Reprinted from my blog:
First, here's the backstory, for those of you haven't been paying attention: at last Tuesday's CNN/Rock The Vote presidential candidates' debate, a Brown University freshman caused many of us watching here to slap ourselves on the forehead with collective embarrassment when she asked the candidates if they preferred Macs or PCs. After subsequent banter and harrassment from the always-moronic forum of the Brown Daily Jolt and by getting a "coal" in the Brown Daily Herald's weekly "Diamonds and Coals" Friday editorial, she wrote a column for Monday's BDH asserting that CNN producers had fed her the question and insisted that she not change it to make it sound more, say, intelligent.
Evidently, the BDH, for all its many faults, has readership in the national media, as the story has now reached today's Boston Globe (via the LA Times), as well as gotten CNN to admit it "went too far" to the Associated Press.
CNN's apologia is bullshit: my suitemate's sister, who is a Brown med student, was similarly called up that morning because they said they might need someone to ask a question about increased costs of care, and fed exactly what that question would be. She ended up not being called on to ask it during the debate, but did attest to the fact that all of the questions were similarly staged (c'mon, did you really think that the "who would you party with?" question was the product of original thought?) . It really is nice to know that the media establishment's idea of engaging the youth (not to mention it being shared by the organization that is supposed to transcend those idiots, Rock The Vote) is to falsely create the image of quirky questions to see how "hip" the candidates are. Last I looked, insulting people's intelligence wasn't exactly the ticket to engaging them...
(go to my blog for the full post with links-- haven't exactly figured out manual HTML tagging yet).