Posted on 11/30/2007 7:52:58 AM PST by ConservativeMajority
Edited on 11/30/2007 8:15:04 AM PST by Lead Moderator. [history]
CNN's YouTube Republican presidential debate will go down in history as one of America's biggest media scandals alongside Dan Rather's fake documents and Will Duranty's Pultizer Prize-winning pro-Stalin proganda for The New York Times. The cries of "foul" from conservatives and Republicans will soon be drowned out by the wails from those who rightfully lose their jobs at CNN for the supposedly objective forum that was rife with Democratic activists posing "gotcha" questions.
So far, bloggers have unmasked no less that NINE "undecided voters" who have obvious and announced ties to Democratic presidential candidates or pro-Democrat special interest groups. It is lakely that more fraud will be discovered soon.
At this point, an investigation of the screening and selection process needs to be conducted. The network officials responsible for organizing the debate should be identified and held accountable.
I'm calling on CNN President Jonathan Klein to immediately intiate such an investigation. In the past, Klein has had much to say about press integrity and should step up to the plate now that an enormous fraud has been perpetrated on his watch.
As I note in my book, "The Great Media War: A Battlefield Report" Jonathan Klein, a former CBS executive uttered the famous quote about those who challenged the authenticity of the documents Dan Rather used to smear President Bush, "These bloggers have no checks and balances...[Y]ou couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing."
Where were those "multiple layers of checks and balances" at CNN, Mr. Klein?
In his April 2005 keynote address to the National Association of Broadcasters, Klein had the audacity to suggest that the White House Correspondents Association cancel its gala and "instead spend that time and energy creating standards - and enforcing them - for those who would call themselves White House correspondents." By this he meant find ways to keep independent conservative journalists like Jeff Gannon away from the White House briefing room. It would appear that Jonathan Klein and his minions have perfected a filter to keep Republican and conservative voters from CNN debates.
John Roberts from CNN was just on Laura Ingraham’s show and walked all over her....and he got away with it!! Her arguments and info were LACKING.
NICE!
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Although I wish it weren’t true, I think this story has peaked.
No one will be fired, promoted maybe...
ping
well if they can’t handle a few questions from Democrats they aren’t qualified to be President anyway
And on the gay general, it was having him harangue the candidates from the audience that was the biggest outrage. A total left wing disruption of the debate. I don't see how CNN could argue its way out of that.
It'll be old news by next week. The R candidates could keep it relevant, however, by boycotting CNN. No more R debates, news shows, interviews, etc. with CNN. The odds that that'll happen, however.....
Laura Ingraham has really done a poor job as a talk show host - I stopped listening to her over a year ago when I just got tired of her bashing Republicans and allowing liberals to come on her show regularly. I don’t want to listen to Pat Buchanan or Charlie Rangel on talk radio or I’d be listening to Air America. Why is Rush so popular - he doesn’t shovel down guests all day long - the few times he gets guests on guess who they are: Vice President Dick Cheney and even President George W. Bush! Yep, Rush is the tops in talk radio and he doesn’t sit back and let people run his show for him!
You miss the point. It’s not whether or not they can “handle” the questions (they actually did handle them pretty well with a couple of exceptions). It’s how the questioners were presented as being “average” voters, Republicans or on the fence voters. That was a flat out lie. Had the Republicans pulled a stunt like this one, there would have been senate hearings, house hearings, DOJ investigations, and who knows what else.
LLS
Another day, another media fraud. It’s a habit hard to break for them.
I couldn’t agree more, but let the myriad Democrats in the press ask the questions. This debate among Republican candidates was intended to allow undecided Republican voters to pose questions to Republicans. If a few Democrats got a question or two in, that is one thing, but it seems clear that the deck was stacked to make Republicans look bad. Is the Confederate flag an issue that Republicans care about or has been a factor in this election? Gays in the military? This was a sham and needs to be exposed - just as the last CNN debate with the planted questions from the Hillary campaign does. If a network cannot be trusted, why should anyone watch, should Republicans show up for a debate or be granted access to the President and the White House?
That happens often to Laura, but when you are a populist that interviews liberals, you lose.
That's the difference between Bill Bennett and Laura Ingraham, sad to say. Ingraham's show, be it her or her staff, it's still her name on the marque, have a strong "Not invented here" bias. So she walks into the gun fight holding a butter knife.
Bennett's producer, Seth Liebson, had an ear to the ground and passed it along to Bennett and there was Bennett getting it in play virtually immediately. A real coup.
Is it just me?
Or does anyone else think that we’ll get no worthwhile leadership from idiots who let the enemy control their debate?
everyone should boycott CNN - they have lost their credibility from long ago. Recall their propaganda reporting in the first Iraq War (Kuwait freedom war),- spurious interviews - false reporting by their foreign correspondents, etc.
You are a deeply disturbed person if you think Pat Buchanan is a liberal.
Fraudulent Debates have NO place in America.
The COMMISSION ON PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES must immediately investigate this fraud at CNN. They stopped allowing the league of liberal women voters to do debates because that organization was clearly partisan, they MUST do the same with CNN.
Nonsense.
This was a Republican primary, not the general election.
CNN claimed they were going to have Republicans ask questions to their own candidates.
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A lamentably common phenomenon among conservative talk radio types. They can bloviate just fine when they're talking alone, but they get destroyed when it comes time to actually debate. Sean Hannity is the poster child for this disability.
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How quicklythey Vegas debacle and it’s plants are forgotten...
It is not a stated policy, but CNN had a YouTube debate for Democrats already. I’d say common sense suggests that everyone expected undecided Republican voters to be asking questions since the answers are intended to help them determine a Republican nominee.
From the American Thinker this morning:
CNN UTUBE QUESTIONER KICKED ROMNEY “OFF MY PROPERTY”
November 30, 2007
CNN/YouTube Questioner Kicked Romney ‘off my property’
[link=http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/11/cnnyoutube_questioner_kicked_r.html]link[/url]
By Ray Robison
It was bad enough that CNN handed the microphone over to an official, Gen. Kerr of a Hillary Clinton campaign committee to conduct an extended rebuttal of Republican candidates.
But bloggers are continuing to dig in to and are exposing some pretty damning evidence that CNN slanted the questioning via activist proxies. A setting that was supposed to be about undecided Republicans (a primary debate) getting to know the candidates turned out to be a litany of gotcha videos from liberal activists.
Some problems were apparent at the start. For instance, CNN declared that it had selected twenty-four “undecided Republican voters” at the University of Tampa. That was an eye-roller. I went to the University of Tampa, and I think you would be hard pressed to even find twenty-four Republicans there, unless you brought in the ROTC department.
My suspicions were quickly confirmed. One of those “Republicans” was not pleased with any of the candidates but found common ground with that great conservative thinker John Edwards. I think this is where John Stossel might cry “give me a break”. She was one of the folks whom CNN also used for that gee-wiz happiness meter shown after the debate to demonstrate what Republican voters thought of the candidates [cough].
Another questioner named Mark Strauss of Iowa asked Ron Paul to run as an Independent. Wasn’t it a little bit of a tip off to CNN producers that Strauss is not interested in Republican issues when his question was nothing more than an encouragement for a candidate to leave the party?
But clearly, CNN likes the idea of a Republican candidate taking Republican voters to the Independent block for the general election. In case you missed it, Nader did this to Gore and Gore lost. Perot did it to Bush, Sr. and Bush lost. Wonder what CNN might have had in mind by promoting this idea at the debate and selecting it out of thousands of questions that actually would have mattered to Republicans?
Strauss was not randomly chosen as CNN presented a previous video of his at the Democrats’ debate. There is a history between him and CNN. So the “we did not know” defense shouldn’t play here any more than it does in the case of Gen. Kerr who had been on CNN previously.
Strauss’s website is easy enough to find. He writes there:
In October 2006, Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts came to my door in Iowa, yes, at my house. He was there walking up and down the street with Robby Smith campaigning with him. Man, did he pick the wrong door. What is the Governor of MA doing in IA, with a young rookie running for state house? He is a Republican first-American second...hopefully not our next “decider”.
Strauss uses the term “decider” as a pejorative against Republican President George Bush and other Republicans throughout his website.
Mitt asked me what I woud [sic] do in Iraq. I proceeded to explain how we need to get not only the effected nations in the region involved, but strike meaningful discussion and secure true resilution [sic] with the world thru the U.N.. Mitt laughed and called the U.N. a joke. This is the man that wants to be President. Don’t we already have a decider in office that considers the other world leaders a joke? I then said “I have no use for you, get off my property”, and I closed the door. This guy cannot be elected into office in 08.
Wow! His fair minded openness to Republican candidates is just oozing off the page.
As mentioned previously, Strauss had a question for the Democrats at their debate. He asked a reasonable straight forward question about healthcare for seniors.
To the Republicans, he brags about kicking one off his lawn and asked another to leave the Party. And in doing so is encouraging a situation that would take Republican votes in the general election.
I cannot imagine a much more unfair venue than the debate-hoodwink that CNN launched on the Republican Party. Every Republican candidate should make sure it is the last time CNN gets a shot at such cheap tactics.
Ray Robison is proprietor of Ray Robison: Pointing out the Obvious to the Oblivious.
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It is time for one of the Repubican candidates to call them out. That would keep it in the news. But who has the balls to do it?
Oh man....when Bill Bennett announced that the GAY GENERAL was a HILLARY steering committee member, I’ll bet Anderson Cooper wet his silk undies! It wasn’t 5 minutes after the debate!!! KUDOS TO SETH!!!
This won’t be a big story.
But just imagine if it was a DIM debate on FOX? Let’s say just one of the people asking a question had a great-great grandfather who was a Republican.
It would be a huge story with lots of piling on by the media.
I agree, I saw her interview a young girl, maybe as a sub for O'reilly, just last week. The young girl was wearing some weird outfit etc. The young girl actually got the better of laura, I was shocked.
I don’t think either debate should have had planted questions, we could have done without the diamonds or pearls, redsox or yankees questions, but it’s also not a bad thing for the candidates to have to answer questions from the other side, I hate these controlled settings where they only give speeches, etc. in front cheering supporters, it’s not reality
The DIMS boycott FOX NEWS and suffer not, if the GOP boycotts the MSM all they have left is FOX NEWS. As popular as FNC is it can't compete in NUMBERS with the BIG 3, CNN, MSNBC and the rest of the MSM.
I’ve only listened to Ingrams show a few times during the imagration bill. She was very tough. To bad she wasn’t tough on this.
I’ve only listened to Ingrams show a few times during the imagration bill. She was very tough. To bad she wasn’t tough on this.
but what about the fact that OUR QUESTIONS were not asked? OUR QUESTIONS were shut out of the debate in favor of race baiting, homosexual enabling, and great society favoring imaging.
This is not about them standing up to wacko left wing questions. This is about CNN controling the outcome of a presidential election by defining the debate. This is even MORE incidious than the Dan Rather effort to use fake documents to alter a presidential debate. CNN used NO LESS THAN NINE fake questions to alther the outcome of the presidential debate.
By the time we are done ALL the questions will be exposed as manipulated.
She’s ONLY tough on Republicans......she goes easy on Democrats and liberals....sge’s relentless on Republicans.
I haven’t heard Sean Hannity for several years, since I gave up commuting by car. My impression is that he’s a decent guy, pleasant to listen to, with good basic instincts, but extremely naive. So it’s unsurprising that he constantly gets walked over or fooled into false positions.
Rush makes it look easy, but he does his homework. He thinks and studies and prepares before going on the air.
Castiglione explained what talent Rush has in his book, “The Courtier.” He calls it “sprezzatura,” which you might say means working extremely hard to make things look easy.
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Yes, both true and sad.
anderson coopers girlfriend?
The only candidate with any balls....
...but they're Bill's and they're in a jar on her nightstand.
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