JUST HEARD A LENGTHY NPR STORY ON THE YOUTUBE DEBATE, with a live followup from Mara Liasson -- and it omitted any mention of the planted question issue. Hmm. If Fox hosted a Democratic debate and many of the most pointed questions turned out to come from Republican activists, but Fox didn't disclose that, do you think it would pass unremarked?
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A ROUNDUP ON LAST NIGHT'S DEBATE from Stephen Green. Excerpt: "What we really saw tonight was CNN playing out its own agenda in front of a couple million viewers and seven or eight candidates, without anyone calling them on it." Planted questions and all . . . .
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HORTICULTURE JOURNALISM 101 -- a gallery of CNN/YouTube plants. "Abortion questioner is declared Edwards supporter . . . Log Cabin Republican questioner is declared Obama supporter; lead toy questioner is a prominent union activist for the Edwards-endorsing United Steelworkers."
Other than that, they were just "ordinary Americans."
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JEFFREY TOOBIN JUST MADE A FOOL OF HIMSELF by saying that Huckabee needed to explain what he meant by abolishing the IRS. Actually, as Toobin should know if he's going to opine on this stuff on CNN, this isn't some wild idea of Huckabee's but the subject of a bestselling book and a national grassroots movement. That's not to say that it's necessarily a good idea, but it's certainly not something new that Huckabee just made up. The audience knew this. And if this was like earlier debates, there were probably hundreds of Fair Tax demonstrators outside. Toobin should have known it, too.
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An on-air apology from Anderson Cooper, saying that CNN didn't know that Gen. Kerr was on Hillary's steering committee: "If we had known that we would have disclosed it before using the question, if we used the question at all."
Suckered by Hillary, again. Try Google, next time. It's not that hard!
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The Most Trusted Name In News? Maybe in Moonbatlandia.
Update, 11/30/07: This morning's Instapundit contains this gem:
SO I LOOKED AT EDITOR AND PUBLISHER and there's nothing about the CNN planted-question scandal. There's one story on the debate, but it's a puff piece about a cartoonist getting his video in. Then I looked at Poynter and all I could find was this piece on covering the debates. But I'm not seeing anything about the planted-question scandal. I'm not seeing anything at the Columbia Journalism Review site, either. Journalism, cover thyself!
Well, actually I think they are covering . . . .
There's also this:
Now it appears that an amazing number of partisan figures posed many of the 30 questions at the GOP debate all the while pretending to be CNN’s advertised “undecided voters.” Yasmin from Huntsville, Alabama turns out to be a former intern with the Council on American Islamic Relations, a group highly critical of Republicans. Blogger Michelle Malkin has identified other plants, including declared Obama supporter David Cercone, who asked a question about the pro-gay Log Cabin Republicans. A questioner who asked a hostile question about the pro-life views of GOP candidates turned out to be a diehard John Edwards supporter (and a slobbering online fan of Mr. Cooper). Yet another “plant” was LeeAnn Anderson, an activist with a union that has endorsed Mr. Edwards.It seems more “plants” are being uprooted with each passing day. Almost a third of the questioners seem to have some ties to Democratic causes or candidates. Another questioner worked with Democratic Senator Dick Durbin’s staff. A former intern with Democratic Rep. Jane Harman asked a question about farm subsidies. A questioner who purported to be a Ron Paul supporter turns out to be a Bill Richardson volunteer. David McMillan, a TV writer from Los Angeles, turns out to have several paens to John Edwards on his YouTube page and has attended Barack Obama fundraisers.
Given CNN’s professed goal to have “ordinary Americans” ask questions at their GOP debate, how likely is that it was purely by accident that so many of the videos CNN selected for use were not just from partisans, but people actively hostile to the GOP’s messages and candidates?
So long as you have a goofball media vetting the questions from an equally ditzy segment of the population, you will get something that resembles a game show more than a political debate. In fact, the term debate is pretty loosely thrown around here, since there seems to be little in the way of discussion. The planted questions are simply obnoxious and do nothing to add to transparency of these folks. It was a waste of time.
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