In defense of the CNN-YouTube debate, Anderson Cooper said today that it wasn’t possible to let people vote on which questions should be asked tomorrow because the candidates might cheat.
In other words, if everyone was allowed to pick the questions, then John Edwards and his campaign might repeatedly click on a softball question about “two Americas.”
Anderson apparently doesn’t think political candidates have anything more important to do with their time. Here’s exactly what he said in response to a question from Howard Kurtz on Reliable Sources:
We would all very much wish that there was a process by which just everybody out there could select a question, but it’s just not possible at this point . . . You would see campaigns going out there and having all their people click on the questions that they’d wanted to be asked. You would see campaigns attempting to manipulate the process and there is no way to control for that if you leave it open to just a vote count on the Internet.
Even if Hillary forced her entire campaign staff to stay up nights clicking on a question about Obama’s lack of experience, I really doubt she could outnumber the rest of the country’s voters. Still, let’s assume Anderson’s right and Hillary’s army is too much for us to match. If Hillary wants to rally the country around a YouTube question, then why shouldn’t she be allowed to? People who work for a campaign are real people.
What's more likely is Howard Stern could pull a "Sanjaya" and organize his listeners around a question about the rights of strippers, or a more serious question about FCC censorship. That kind of publicity would probably be good for the show's ratings.
The real issue here is CNN (and maybe Anderson Cooper, too) aren’t prepared for truly crowd-sourced debates. It puts them in an awkward position. After all, Howie’s first question was: “Anderson, if the stars of tomorrow’s debate are these ordinary people, those who have submitted these video questions, how do you see your role?”
In other words, couldn’t a monkey do your job tomorrow, Anderson? Well, maybe a really handsome monkey.
