On April 24, CNN held a town meeting for Hillary in prime time, at 10 p.m. Eastern at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Wolf Blitzer claimed, "The format is open-ended." But it was not. Buffalo News Washington bureau chief Douglas Turner reported that university officials submitted to CNN all the names of students attending, and that "questions from university students have been screened by CNN staff members." University administrators gave CNN students’ phone numbers.
Turner called CNN’s behavior "slippery," especially CNN’s calls for student questions on Tuesday afternoon for a Wednesday night broadcast. Although no one found evidence that Hillary received questions in advance, Turner suggested, "That’s an embarrassingly long period of time for mischief to occur." Even if, CNN claimed, Mrs. Clinton had no control over the questions asked or which students were admitted into the audience, it seems odd that there were zero questions from students about any Clinton scandal. No student at the State University of New York at Buffalo was at all interested in scandals, so many of them so salacious, swirling around the Clintons?
In comments before, during, and after the event, Blitzer never explained that the questions and questioners were screened in advance. CNN’s Frank Buckley ended a story the morning after the town hall meeting with a very vague reference that Giuliani’s campaign, "in a statement issued earlier, described Mrs. Clinton’s event as carefully scripted, totally contrived, and utterly fake." Surely it was that, but since Blitzer hadn’t mentioned the screening, CNN viewers didn’t have the information to fairly judge Giuliani’s contention.
CNN did more stage management still, excluding all reporters, with the exception of an Associated Press reporter and photographer, from the auditorium. Even the SUNY-Buffalo student newspaper was barred. In all of the overnight dispatches filed, the AP reporter, Marc Humbert, never mentioned the screened questions or the exclusion of his colleagues.
Humbert did find space for a man who disliked Clinton to praise Hillary: "She’s hot." Here’s what Blitzer told CNN viewers before the debate:
The format is open ended. I'll start off with a few questions of my own, some hopefully news-worthy kinds of questions, then we're opening it up. There will be about 300, almost 400 people here and they'll ask whatever is on their mind, whether it's issues involving New York state, national issues, or international issues. Remember, a Senator from New York — every Senator deals with all these kinds of issues, and so I'm sure there will be a wide range of questions, and if necessary I will follow up and make sure that the necessary follow up is there as well.
But no troublesome scandal questions ever surfaced. Our original report from that time is here.
