LA Times on CNN: Corrupt News Network

The LA Time's Tim Rutten had an important article up (one that I wish I had written) this past Saturday, "CNN: Corrupt News Network - A self-serving agenda was set for the Republican presidential debates". This one's on the embarrassing job CNN did on the Republican debate last week - a debate that CNN is still trying to defend. Here's the crux of Rutten's piece:

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.

After Rutten lays out the facts, it's pretty much impossible to argue with them. However, some commenters did try, somehow bending reality to include their personal opinions about Fox News into the discussion. The first commenter even equates CNN's debate debacle with Fox News' screen captions! What?!

The bottom line is that if anyone tuned in the debate on CNN to see how the Republican candidates stake out their positions on the most important subjects in the country today, they were sorely disappointed. If they tuned in to see a supposedly non-partisan news network attempt to promote the Democratic Party agenda by way of attempting to embarrass the Republican candidates, they were satiated.