CNN: Loser of the Republican debate

Conservatives call it the “Clinton News Network,” and consider it one of the most egregious practitioners of liberal media bias. After CNN’s handling of last week’s Republican presidential debate, said Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online, you can see why. Co-sponsored with YouTube, the debate featured videos of ostensibly ordinary Americans posing strangely hostile questions to the eight leading GOP candidates. But diligent bloggers soon found out that almost one-third of CNN’s 33 handpicked participants were either Democratic “plants” or liberal activists. “The most egregious” was retired Brig. Gen. Keith Kerr, who grilled the candidates about their opposition to gays in the military without revealing he’s part of Hillary Clinton’s “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Steering Committee.” Another questioner was a union activist working for the United Steelworkers, which has endorsed John Edwards. CNN whined that it didn’t know the questioners were plants, said Michelle Malkin in the New York Post. But “cluelessness doesn’t absolve CNN of journalistic malpractice.” Imagine the outcry if Fox News hosted a Democratic debate, and then filled the audience with hostile Republicans.

Actually, just such an event has already happened—but CNN hosted that one, too, said James Rainey in the Los Angeles Times. Some of the “citizen-interrogators” at the CNN/YouTube debate among Democratic candidates last July had “clear conservative credentials.” One Michigan man who wondered “if the Democrats would protect his ‘baby’—an assault rifle he cradled in his arms”—later acknowledged being a supporter of George W. Bush. John McAlpin, another hostile questioner, has a MySpace page featuring pictures of Rudy Giuliani and a caricature portraying Barack Obama as a Muslim radical.

Obviously, CNN’s real sin isn’t that it’s too liberal, said Tim Rutten, also in the Times. It’s that it has no interest in staging debates that will help people know the candidates’ stands on real issues, such as Iraq, the looming recession, $100-a-barrel oil, and spiraling health-care costs. Last week, CNN chose to present citizens whose primary concerns were whether Mitt Romney believes every word in the Bible, whether candidates approve of the Confederate flag, and most of all, how much they hate illegal immigrants. CNN, in fact, devoted the first 35 minutes of the debate to “immigrant bashing” by questioners and candidates alike. Why? CNN’s biggest star is Lou Dobbs, who has built ratings with nightly rants against immigrants. Obviously, the network was using a presidential debate to send the signal that viewers who hate immigrants should watch CNN. Next to that shameless act of self-promotion, “CNN’s incompetent failure to weed out Democratically connected questioners pales.”

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