The student who asked the most ridiculed question at CNN’s "Rock the Vote" debate last week — "Macs or PCs?" — says it wasn’t her idea. Alexandra Trustman said yesterday that a CNN producer called her on the morning of the Boston forum and suggested she ask about the Democratic presidential candidates’ computer preferences. Puzzled by the request, she writes in Brown University’s Daily Herald, she drafted a more complicated question about how the candidates would use technology. But in Boston, Trustman said, she was handed a notecard with the digital-age equivalent of the boxers-or-briefs choice put to Bill Clinton. She wrote that she told the producer "I didn’t see the question’s relevance," but that he rejected her proposed query "because it wasn’t light-hearted enough and they wanted to modulate the event with various types of questions." Trustman said she was informed that the network "thought it would be a good opportunity for the candidates to relate to a younger audience."
This line is the key point to me. CNN broke the trust given to them in hosting a fair debate in order to promote Democrats to a younger audience... in other words they were campaigning for Democrats during a debate. I don’t think they can be trusted to hold any future debates, especially between Republicans and Democrats. If they would do this what’s to stop them from supplying questions to Democrats well before a debate and leave the Republicans in the dark, among other things.... |