CNN Managing Editor Defends Crowley In E-Mail

TMZ has obtained an e-mail CNN Managing Editor Mark Whitaker sent to the cable news agency's staff trying to blunt criticism about Candy Crowley's role as a substitute teleprompter to aid President Obama's performance in Tuesday night's debate with Mitt Romney. Whitaker accused the Romney camp of engaging in pre-debate attempt to intimidate her, defended her misleading fact-checking intervention to rescue Obama on the Benghazi terrorist attack question, and attributed the need to allow Obama much more speaking time because "he speaks more slowly."

"Let's start with a big round of applause for Candy Crowley for a superb job under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. She and her team had to select and sequence questions in a matter of hours, and then she had to deal with the tricky format, the nervous questioners, the aggressive debaters, all while shutting out the pre-debate attempts to spin and intimidate her. She pulled it off masterfully.

The reviews on Candy's performance have been overwhelmingly positive but Romney supporters are going after her on two points, no doubt because their man did not have as good a night as he had in Denver. On the legitimacy of Candy fact-checking Romney on Obama's Rose Garden statement, it should be stressed that she was just stating a point of fact: Obama did talk about an act (or acts) of terror, no matter what you think he meant by that at the time. On why Obama got more time to speak, it should be noted that Candy and her commission producers tried to keep it even but that Obama went on longer largely because he speaks more slowly. We're going to do a word count to see whether, as in Denver, Romney actually got more words in even if he talked for a shorter period of time."

It's no wonder Romney's camp would have been doing pre-debate spin about the potential for Crowley's bias to appear during Tuesday night's debate. After all, she described the Ryan-Romney ticket a couple of months ago as the "ticket death wish." The notion that CNN would go as far as to conduct a word count to prove that Obama said no more than Romney in the additional time Crowley allotted to him to speak is laughable.