The following piece was produced by HuffPost's OffTheBus.
Apart from Fred Thompson's incessant "um"s and "uh"s (it must be the writers' strike that's got his tongue), my overwhelming impression of the questions selected from YouTube for the GOP by CNN was that most of the questioners were nearly as white as Mitt Romney's nemesis, Billiam the Snowman. Compared with the 38 questions used in the Democratic CNN/YouTube debate, the 33 questions to the GOP came up short in diversity: only 18% from women to the Democrats' 21% (within the statistical margin of error), and only 12% from minorities to the Democrats' 24%. That last pair of numbers could be more like 9% and 21%, if you don't count a Muslim woman from Alabama (GOP debate) or a generally half-asian looking guy (Democratic debate) as bonafide "minorities." Either way, we were safely into the second hour of the show before we saw our first African-American faces.
David Colarusso, creator of communitycounts.us and its derivative, 10questions.com, said in a video interview right after the debate that it wasn't so much the lack of diversity in questioners as the lack of diversity in issues that was most disappointing. CNN clearly didn't heed the advice of either viewer-dictated video ranking website: you have to skip all the way to the 98th highest-rated video on communitycounts.us to find the first one used in the debate (the animated Dick Cheney asking about Vice Presidential power).
Particular questions and questioners aside, the general issues that are most popular on both websites were also conspicuously absent on the CNN circus. The top ten questions on 10questions.com cover net neutrality, theocratic government, medical marijuana, warrantless wiretapping, election reform (twice), corporate personhood, transparency in government, the size of government, and the two-party system. Only the next-to-last issue there made the cut. At the communitycounts.us page for the GOP debate, the top twenty videos covered topics like corporate personhood, media reform and protection, theocratic government, health care, impeachment (such a loaded question would never make the big show), presidential power, and the Equal Rights Amendment. I didn't see any of those Wednesday night, did you?
We had to rely on the internet to give us the tools with which we could directly address our would-be leaders; looks like we'll have to rely on the internet still if we hope to get a direct answer from them. CNN is too interested in the bloodsport to give us a forum for real ideas.