At least CNN is consistent. At the Democratic debate, CNN was faced with planted Democratic operatives and activists asking questions, and at the Republican debate, there were Democratic operatives and activists asking questions. At the very minimum, CNN is guilty of false advertising. They promised one thing...

"There are quite a few things you might describe as Democratic 'gotchas,' and we are weeding those out," Mr. Bohrman said. CNN wants to ensure that next Wednesday’s Republican event is "a debate of their party."

...and delivered something else . Michelle Malkin may be a partisan pundit, but her reporting on the questioners was factual. Borhman also said this :

The debate format remains the same as it did for Democrats in July. CNN's political team will review the submissions and choose about 40 videos that can be used Wednesday. David Bohrman, CNN's Washington bureau chief and the mastermind behind the format, said he heard from two campaigns - he won't name which - expressing concerns about the selection process and the perceived liberal bias of CNN, dubbed by many conservatives as the "Clinton News Network."

"Some of the Republican candidates don't trust us. They're not completely convinced that we're going to wean out the Democratic gotcha questions," Bohrman said. "But I've been very clear from the beginning: This will be a Republican debate, and the goal is to let Republican voters see their candidates."

More below the fold...
John Fund puts it in perspective :

Now it appears that an amazing number of partisan figures posed many of the 30 questions at the GOP debate all the while pretending to be CNN’s advertised "undecided voters." Yasmin from Huntsville, Alabama turns out to be a former intern with the Council on American Islamic Relations, a group highly critical of Republicans. Blogger Michelle Malkin has identified other plants, including declared Obama supporter David Cercone, who asked a question about the pro-gay Log Cabin Republicans. A questioner who asked a hostile question about the pro-life views of GOP candidates turned out to be a diehard John Edwards supporter (and a slobbering online fan of Mr. Cooper). Yet another "plant" was LeeAnn Anderson, an activist with a union that has endorsed Mr. Edwards.

It seems more "plants" are being uprooted with each passing day. Almost a third of the questioners seem to have some ties to Democratic causes or candidates. Another questioner worked with Democratic Senator Dick Durbin’s staff. A former intern with Democratic Rep. Jane Harman asked a question about farm subsidies. A questioner who purported to be a Ron Paul supporter turns out to be a Bill Richardson volunteer. David McMillan, a TV writer from Los Angeles, turns out to have several paens to John Edwards on his YouTube page and has attended Barack Obama fundraisers.

Given CNN’s professed goal to have "ordinary Americans" ask questions at their GOP debate, how likely is that it was purely by accident that so many of the videos CNN selected for use were not just from partisans, but people actively hostile to the GOP’s messages and candidates?

This sorry episode goes beyond incompetence and well into the realm of media bias. This is CNN, and this is the mainstream media we have . Every picture tells a story, don't it:

According to Gallup , if you're a Democrat, mainstream news coverage seems about right, maybe even a little conservative, which explains why so many Democrats are so clueless about media bias. Republicans and independents have a decidedly different opinion about the way the news is being covered. So who's right? I wrote about this at Tacitus during the 2004 campaign, where Pew Research came out with a poll on national and local media, and here are the self-described political views of national media:

The facts are that 36% of national print media described themselves as liberal and only 8% as conservative. National broadcast media has roughly the same percentage of conservatives, but a lower percentage of liberals (20%). This assumes, of course, that these self-descriptions are reasonably accurate. It could be very well be true that those who think of themselves as "moderate" are really left-of-center, or vice versa. Perhaps a more telling measure is to follow the money , or put it more accurately, politicial contributions to candidates:

MSNBC.com identified 143 journalists who made political contributions from 2004 through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal causes. Only 16 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.

Quite a stunning contrast. Of course, this only covers a fraction of all mainstream journalists, so is there another measure? Yes. There's that UCLA study :

Here's a description of their methodology:

In this paper we estimate ADA (Americans for Democratic Action) scores for major media outlets such as the New York Times, USA Today, Fox News’ Special Report, and all three network television news shows. Our estimates allow us to answer such questions as “Is the average article in the New York Times more liberal than the average speech by Tom Daschle?” or “Is the average story on Fox News more conservative than the average speech by Bill Frist?” To compute our measure, we count the times that a media outlet cites various think tanks and other policy groups. We compare this with the times that members of Congress cite the same think tanks in their speeches on the floor of the House and Senate. By comparing the citation patterns we construct an ADA score. As a simplified example, imagine that there were only two think tanks, one liberal and one conservative. Suppose that the New York Times cited the liberal think tank twice as often as the conservative one. Our method asks: What is the typical ADA score of members of Congress who exhibit the same frequency (2:1) in their speeches? This is the score that we would assign to the New York Times. Our results show a strong liberal bias. All of the news outlets except Fox News’ Special Report and the Washington Times received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. Consistent with many conservative critics, CBS Evening News and the New York Times received a score far left of center. Outlets such as the Washington Post, USA Today, NPR’s Morning Edition, NBC’s Nightly News and ABC’s World News Tonight were moderately left. The most centrist outlets (but still left-leaning) by our measure were the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, CNN’s NewsNight with Aaron Brown, and ABC’s Good Morning America. Fox News’ Special Report, while right of center, was closer to the center than any of the three major networks’ evening news broadcasts. All of our findings refer strictly to the news stories of the outlets. That is, we omitted editorials, book reviews, and letters to the editor from our sample.

At CNN, Anderson Cooper and his crew are biased, either wittingly or unwittingly. The editors at Redstate are right. CNN's handling of the debate was unacceptable, there should be a do-over, and somebody should get sacked. They were so enthralled with General Kerr--a Hillary political operative--that they flew him to Florida (and about a dozen others) so he could ask his gays-in-the-military question in person. If they actually had a Republican on staff (and I seriously doubt they did), they would've known that this issue is peripheral at best to the party faithful. CNN's problem reminds me of something Jonah Goldberg wrote over three years ago, not long after Dan Rather and Mary Mapes blew up their careers over forged memos:

I have discovered the solution to liberal media bias. What mainstream journalism needs are more stupid people.

Conservative critics of the journo-industrial complex might dismiss this advice as merely adding more jelly-beans to the jar. Liberal journalists would regard it as absurd, because surely it is their genius that makes them special. Why would the temple want any - much less, more - stupid priests?

Well, it turns out that having a few stupid people in the group makes the group smarter. I've long suspected this, but I found confirmation in James Surowiecki's new book, "The Wisdom of Crowds."

It works like this. Groups of experts tend to reinforce their own views, particularly because experts believe in the authority of experts, causing them to defer to the super-expert in the group. Stupid people are, to put it bluntly, too stupid to defer to smart people. Remember the story about the truck that got jammed in the tunnel because it was too tall? All the experts were stumped. But some kid yelled, "Let the air out of the tires," saving the day. This is essentially the moral of the fable of "The Emperor's New Clothes." Substitute kids with morons and you get the same thing.

We've all been in meetings where the token idiot says something absurd and everyone reflexively groans. But then someone says, "Wait a second, Lothar may be on to something." The utility of the muttonhead is that he's too dim to cotton on to the groupthink and therefore is more likely to raise unconventional ideas.

This, according to Surowiecki, is the value of diversity within groups. He doesn't dwell on the need for stupid people per se, but he's fairly persuasive that even the "smartest" groups of experts are often outsmarted by more diverse groups that boast members with far less impressive credentials. For example, Scott Page, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, ran a series of computer models pitting all-smart groups of agents against other groups of more diverse agents ranging from not-so-smart to smart. The group with the lower average intelligence was almost always better at solving problems than the smarter one.

The bulk of the Wisdom of Crowds is a defense of the collective intelligence of markets and the like (Surowiecki is a financial columnist for The New Yorker). But the example of media bias struck a chord with me from the beginning. I've never bought the more conspiratorial conservative theories about liberal media bias. I agree that it exists, I just don't think it's nearly as deliberate and conscious as some on the right think. Most liberal journalists I've known truly believe they are consummate professionals. And for that reason alone, a lot of biased coverage has to be the result of something other than deliberate plotting. That something else is liberal groupthink.

For example, my guess is that Dan Rather truly believes he fell for those forged documents because he was just trying to get a scoop. But no one at CBS raised the necessary objections because they were all eager to nail Bush. No one - not even an idiot - said, "Hey maybe we should take an extra week to make sure these things are real." Not even after their own consultants said the documents were iffier than a new "Rollecks" watch. If the target had been a Democrat, the usual safeguards would have kicked in.

CNN could have used a few of those safeguards.