CNN Defines "Extremely Hard"

Captain's Quarters:

Howard Kurtz reviews the CNN debacle in his column today, an extension of his blog post at The Trail last night. He leads with CNN's expression of regret over the inclusion of General Keith Kerr, a member of Hillary Clinton's campaign steering committee on gay and lesbian issues. But at the end, Kurtz includes this strange defense from CNN's Washington bureau chief David Bohrman:

Bohrman said he had no problem using questioners who have voiced support for other candidates as long as they are not donors or formally affiliated with any campaign. "We bent over backwards to be fair," he said. "We're not perfect. But we tried extremely hard."

Extremely hard? That seems very questionable, as James Joyner points out in a quote Kurtz includes just before this. Within minutes of the broadcast, bloggers using nothing more than Google unearthed Kerr's connection to the Hillary Clinton campaign. With the other questioners, CNN apparently didn't even bother to peruse their posted profiles on their YouTube accounts, where they could have easily discovered their professed support for their candidates.
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Memo to CNN: quit trying to excuse this away. No one tried "extremely hard" to vet these questions. Obviously, no one tried vetting them at all. The continuation of the pretense only damages your credibility even further than the debate did.

Giving them the benefit of the doubt, what is really exposed in the CNN YouTube debate is that the Liberals and Leftists who work for CNN are totally clueless about the issues that Republicans and Conservatives believe are important. Instead, they gave us questions that came out of the fevered imaginations of what the MoveOn and Kos types think the Right cares about. They gave us caricatures of the right; straw men that begged the question. It reveals an ignorance on the part of the Drive-By-Media that is shocking if true and reprehensible if not.