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"Politics are a touchy subject. American politics, doubly so.\nWednesday night, CNN and YouTube played host to a Republican debate that, as it turns out, has stirred up a bit of controversy. It would appear that either CNN has the worst screening process known to man, or that there is indeed a liberal bias in the media. Whichever theory you ascribe to, the process of political debates utilizing social media has been significantly tarnished.\nMichelle Malkin has been the blogger most closely advancing the research on exactly who asked the questions at the debate, and at present count, nearly 30% of all questions asked were from planted questioners. That is to say, the various Democratic Presidential campaigns put out questions to the Republican candidates, and instead of picking questions from the constituency of the Republican base, CNN decided to wave through folks into the debate who would never vote for any of the candidates in an effort to shape their image in what they hoped would be an embarrassing way.\nThe first one discovered was actually addressed by Anderson Cooper on air: Retired Brig. Gen. Keith H. Kerr asked candidates \"why you think that American men and women in uniform are not professional enough to serve with gays and lesbians.\" It was later found out that Kerr was named a co-chairman of the group this month, according to a campaign press release, and was also active in John F. Kerry's 2004 campaign for president.\nSparking suspicion amongst the conservative blogosphere, Malkin and many others began investigating the other questioners (with really clever techniques, like clicking on their YouTube profile links). Redstate blog had this to say about the initial discover:\nThis is the second time in the past few weeks that CNN has had itself a debate scandal\u2014the most recent scandal being CNN's failure to disclose that James Carville, who was invited to comment on the last Democratic Presidential debate, is an adviser to Hillary Clinton. Either the organization has to clean up its act or it has to stand convicted of rampant dishonesty in its presentation of news and views. And unless heads roll, the latter option becomes the most likely one for CNN.\nCNN then scrubbed the question from their online replay version of the debate; the show played as if the question was never asked:\nAn eagle-eyed commenter at the Hot Air overflow thread is claiming CNN is trying to erase history vis-a-vis the Hillary plant. When are they going to learn that scrubbing after the fact doesn\u2019t work.\nYouTube reportedly removed the video as well, but as of the writing of this article, it appears to be back up. Regardless, in a matter of hours, about a third of the questioners were discovered to be plants as well:\nAbortion Questioner: Declared Edwards supporter.Log Cabin Republican Questioner: Declared Obama supporter.Lead Toy Questioner: Prominent union activist, and endorser of John Edwards.Muslim Questioner: former CAIR intern (CAIR is an organization with known ties to Islamic terrorist networks).Social Security Questioner: Adam Florzak quit his job with Caterpillar  to work with Dick Durbin on Social Security reform.\"PaulBot\" Questioner: Mark Strauss, a declared Bill Richardson supporter.Corn Subsidies Questioner: Ted Faturos, a former intern for Rep. Jane Harman (D-California)Black Republicans Questioner: David McMillan, declared Obama supporter and \"Uncle-Tom\" hunter.\nThis whole debacle may be the fault of Old Media,  and CNN's lousy vetting process.  Unfortunately, just as Dan Rather's personal biases led him down the primrose path of accepting a producer's made-up research that ultimately ended his career, YouTube's biases led them to trust CNN with their reputation. Without having a hand in any of the question selection process, Old Media struck a blow back at New.\nAs you may recall, the Republican YouTube-CNN debate almost didn't happen.  Many Republican candidates were afraid that the response from the Internet would be goofy, degrading, and inherently biased.  When I've made personal note of this fact here in the past, the flood of comments tended to support the notion that we in tech have a liberal reputation.\nThis debacle certainly isn't going to help that perception, and it could set back significant engagement with conservative candidates for quite a time, if it isn't rectified. Polls are saying, at least at this point, we'll probably end up with a Republican president here in America. Do we really need another four to eight years of a disengaged government when it comes to issues important to the technology constituency?  It may be that groups like the RIAA and MPAA could end up going away, and thus cease to set the agenda for issues that matter to us.\nThat doesn't mean that AT&amp;T or Comcast's lobby couldn't step up to fill the void, and influence even more dumb laws that set technology back significantly. By disenfranchising the conservative community from the tech community with hare-brained stunts like this, we're virtually assuring ourselves that we'll never get the government we want.\nWe are turning the disconnection of conservative and Republican leadership from the tech community into a self-fulfilling prophecy.\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2007/11/30/youtube-cnn-republican-debate-reflects-poorly-on-new-media/>