The Los Angeles Times
Regarding Media / Tim Rutten

CNN: Corrupt News Network

A self-serving agenda was set for the Republican presidential debates.

Tim Rutten
Regarding Media

December 1, 2007

THE United States is at war in the Middle East and Central Asia, the economy
is writhing like a snake with a broken back, oil prices are relentlessly
climbing toward $100 a barrel and an increasing number of Americans just
can’t afford to be sick with anything that won’t be treated with aspirin and
bed rest.

So, when CNN brought the Republican presidential candidates together this
week for what is loosely termed a "debate," what did the country get but a
discussion of immigration, Biblical inerrancy and the propriety of flying
the Confederate flag?

In fact, this most recent debacle masquerading as a presidential debate
raises serious questions about whether CNN is ethically or professionally
suitable to play the political role the Democratic and Republican parties
recently have conceded it.

Selecting a president is, more than ever, a life and death business, and a
news organization that consciously injects itself into the process, as CNN
did by hosting Wednesday’s debate, incurs a special responsibility to
conduct itself in a dispassionate and, most of all, disinterested fashion.
When one considers CNN’s performance, however, the adjectives that leap to
mind are corrupt and incompetent.

Corruption is a strong word. But consider these facts: The gimmick behind
Wednesday’s debate was that the questions would be selected from those that
ordinary Americans submitted to the video sharing Internet website YouTube,
which is owned by Google. According to CNN, its staff culled through 5,000
submissions to select the handful that were put to the candidates. That
process essentially puts the lie to the vox populi aura the association with
YouTube was meant to create. When producers exercise that level of
selectivity, the questions — whoever initially formulated and recorded them
— actually are theirs.

That’s where things begin to get troubling, because CNN chose to devote the
first 35 minutes of this critical debate to a single issue — immigration.
Now, if that leaves you scratching your head, it’s probably because you’re
included in the 96% of Americans who do not think immigration is the most
important issue confronting this country. We’ve got a pretty good fix
concerning what’s on the American mind right now, because the nonpartisan
and highly reliable Pew Center has been regularly polling people since
January on the issues that matter most to them. In fact, the center’s most
recent survey was conducted in the days leading up to Wednesday’s debate.

HERE’S what Pew found: By an overwhelming margin, Americans think the war in
Iraq is the most important issue facing the United States, followed by the
economy, healthcare and energy prices. In fact, if you lump the war into a
category with terrorism and other foreign policy issues, 40% of Americans
say foreign affairs are their biggest concern in this election cycle. If you
do something similar with all issues related to the economy, 31% list those
questions as their most worrisome issue. As anybody who has looked at their
401(k) or visited a gas pump would expect, that aggregate figure has
increased dramatically since Pew started polling in January. Back then, for
example, concerns over the war outpaced economic anxieties by fully 8 to 1.
By contrast, just 6% of the survey’s national sample said that immigration
was the most important electoral issue. Moreover, that number hasn’t changed
in a statistically meaningful way since the first of the year. In other
words, more than nine out of 10 Americans think something matters more than
immigration in this presidential election.

So, why did CNN make immigration the keystone of this debate? What standard
dictated the decision to give that much time to an issue so remote from the
majority of voters’ concerns? The answer is that CNN’s most popular
news-oriented personality, Lou Dobbs, has made opposition to illegal
immigration and free trade the centerpiece of his neonativist/neopopulist
platform. In fact, Dobbs led into Wednesday’s debate with a good solid dose
of immigrant bashing. His network is in a desperate ratings battle with Fox
News and, in a critical prime-time slot, with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. So,
what’s good for Dobbs is good for CNN.

In other words, CNN intentionally directed the Republicans’ debate to
advance its own interests. Make immigration a bigger issue and you’ve made a
bigger audience for Dobbs.

That’s corruption, and it’s why the Republican candidates had to spend more
than half an hour "debating" an issue on which their differences are
essentially marginal — and, more important, why GOP voters had to sit and
wait, mostly in vain, for the issues that really concern them to be
discussed. That’s particularly true because that same Pew poll reported
findings of particular relevance to Republican voters, the vast majority of
whom continue to support the war in Iraq.

According to this most recent poll, a substantial number of Americans
believe the surge is working. As Pew summarized their findings, "While Iraq
remains a deeply polarizing issue across party lines, there has been
improvement in how both Democrats and Republicans view the war. At the
lowest point in February, barely half of Republicans (51%) said things were
going well. Today, 74% of Republicans say the same. And while Democrats
remain far more skeptical than Republicans, the proportion of Democrats
expressing a positive view of the Iraq effort has doubled since February
(from 16% to 33%).

"Independents’ assessments of how the military effort is going remain far
closer to the views of Democrats than of Republicans. Currently, 41% of
independents offer a positive assessment, while half say things are not
going well. In February, 26% of independents expressed a positive view of
the situation in Iraq."

Those are significant swings of opinion, yet the poll also found that more
than half of Americans still favor withdrawing American troops. That
disconnect is a real issue for the GOP candidates, all but one of whom
support the war. Unless we’re going to believe that the self-selecting
YouTube questioners were utterly different from the rest of American voters,
it seems pretty clear that CNN ignored these complex — and highly relevant
concerns — for an issue that served its ratings interests — immigration —
or ones that made for moments of conventional television conflict, like gun
control, which doesn’t even show up in surveys of voters’ concerns.

THIS is intellectual venality, but it pales beside the wickedness of using
some crackpot’s query about the candidates’ stand on Biblical inerrancy to
do something that’s anathema in our system — to probe people’s individual
religious consciences. American journalists quite legitimately ask
candidates about policy issues — say, abortion — that might be influenced
by their religious or philosophical convictions. We do not and should not
ask them about those convictions themselves. It’s nobody’s business whether
a candidate believes in the virgin birth, whether God gave an oral Torah to
Moses at Sinai, whether the Buddha escaped the round of birth and rebirth or
whether an angel appeared to Joseph Smith.

The latter point is relevant because CNN’s noxious laundering of this
question through the goofy YouTube mechanism quite clearly was designed to
embarrass Mitt Romney — who happens to be a Mormon — and, secondarily, to
help Mike Huckabee — who, as a Baptist minister, had a ready answer, and
who happens to be television’s campaign flavor of the month.

Beside considerations like these, CNN’s incompetent failure to weed out
Democratically connected questioners pales.

In any event, CNN has failed in its responsibilities to the political
process and it’s time for the leaders of both the Republican and Democratic
parties to take the network out of our electoral affairs.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com