"Mac or PC?" So rang out the most intense question in the most recent debate between Democratic candidates for US President. Of the eight candidates in the debate, all but Carol Moseley Braun and John Kerry fessed up to being PC users, most likely of the Windows variety. OK, so it was hardly the most intense question, but it did come from someone in the audience, right? Not so, says the young woman who asked the question during the MTV/CNN co-produced Rock the Vote debate. According to Alexandra Trustman, the question was staged, and producers "rejected" her attempts to make her question more relevant. From the Washington Post:
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."
There’s more in the full story at the Washington Post‘s Web site. We noticed this only because our friends at As the Apple Turns noticed it first.
The Mac Observer Spin:
What a silly situation, but we still find it interesting. While it was clearly a flubbed attempt at making the debate reach out, as it were, to young people, it’s amazing that the "Mac vs. PC?" question has become so pervasive in society as to warrant being included in the first place.
In any event, the mystery of how such a question came to be included is more or less solved.