The Dog and Pony Show
Nov 16th, 2007 at 2:49 pm by Susie
CNN, via Duncan. As someone who recently worked a high-profile campaign, I’d like to share my two cents about these staged debates.
I don’t blame the candidates for doing what apparently works under the present rules of the game. I blame the media, who go out of their way to manufacture mountains out of molehills that distract from and obscure the real issues, and I blame the Charlie Brown voters who fall for it, every single time.
Mind you, this is the exact same media that attacked Hillary Clinton all last week for planting a question in an audience. No cognitive dissonance there!
Maria Luisa, the UNLV student who asked Hillary Clinton whether she preferred “diamonds or pearls” at last night’s debate wrote on her MySpace page this morning that CNN forced her to ask the frilly question instead of a pre-approved query about the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.
“Every single question asked during the debate by the audience had to be approved by CNN,” Luisa writes. “I was asked to submit questions including “lighthearted/fun” questions. I submitted more than five questions on issues important to me. I did a policy memo on Yucca Mountain a year ago and was the finalist for the Truman Scholarship. For sure, I thought I would get to ask the Yucca question that was APPROVED by CNN days in advance.”
