Although I am still not much of a fan of Fox News, one of the things that is admirable about the network is its spontaneity. On CNN or MSNBC, frankly you pretty much know what the talking head is going to say next. This is in marked contrast to Fox News which, at least to me, seems far more free wheeling.
Apparently CNN takes it scripted appearance very seriously, going so far as to plant questions in a presidential candidate debate (and make an apparently smart young woman look like an airhead),
Alexandra Trustman said yesterday that a CNN producer called her on the morning of the Boston forum and suggested she ask about the Democratic presidential candidates’ computer preferences. Puzzled by the request, she writes in Brown University’s Daily Herald, she drafted a more complicated question about how the candidates would use technology.
But in Boston, Trustman said, she was handed a notecard with the digital-age equivalent of the boxers-or-briefs choice put to Bill Clinton. She wrote that she told the producer “I didn’t see the question’s relevance,” but that he rejected her proposed query “because it wasn’t light-hearted enough and they wanted to modulate the event with various types of questions.”
Source:
‘Light’ Not Quite Right for This Forum. Howard Kurtz, Washington Post, November 11, 2003.