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Last week's debate in Las Vegas among the Democratic presidential candidates ended on a particularly low note:

Cable News Network host Wolf Blitzer: "Maria, would you stand, please? Give us your full name."

Maria Parra Sandoval: "Maria Parra Sandoval, and I'm a UNLV student. And my question is for Senator Clinton. This is a fun question for you. Do you prefer diamonds or pearls?"

Hillary Clinton: "Now, I know I'm sometimes accused of not being able to make a choice. I want both."

CNN White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux: "Do we get to ask any of the other candidates or I supposed just Senator Clinton?"

Joseph Biden: "I'm for diamonds. Diamonds."

Sandoval: "It's the only thing -- it's the only thing shiny up there."

Malveaux: "OK. Thank you so much."

Blitzer: "All right. So on that note, diamonds and pearls, I want to thank all of the Democratic presidential candidates for joining us here this evening."

After the program ended, Sandoval found herself the target of harsh criticism over the frivolous exchange. As so often happens in these kinds of public controversies, it was not that simple. Sandoval had a hand in the writing of the question, but CNN had a larger role. She responded on her MySpace site (www.myspace.com/maria_luisa_rocks) that the network required her to ask the question as a condition of getting to ask a question at all. She wrote:

"Every single question asked during the debate by the audience had to be approved by CNN. I was asked to submit questions including 'lighthearted/fun' questions. I submitted more than five questions on issues important to me. I did a policy memo on Yucca Mountain a year ago... For sure, I thought I would get to ask the Yucca question that was approved by CNN days in advance."

It was not to be, she wrote: "CNN ran out of time and used me to 'close' the debate with the pearls/diamonds question."

CNN more or less confirmed Sandoval's account to newsman Greg Sargent.

First of all, Sandoval is new to public life and not particularly savvy in public controversies (she posted her supposedly public explanation on a page she has 'set to private'), so it's fair to cut her some slack.

As Sargent wrote, "[I]t's obvious that the girl was hardly 'forced' to ask this; rather, she was offered the opportunity and took it. The network wanted to close on a light question, and they chose this one. On the other hand, the network is confirming that it did in fact choose a question that quizzed the first credible female Presidential candidate on her taste in jewelry. That's confessing to some pretty questionable taste."

What is getting too little attention is the not the network's taste but its judgment. Why is a supposed news network screening questions in the first place? Questions that are held out as representing the public should be genuinely so. When I was in television news, it was a license violation to stage news to look like it was a live shot when it was actually taped. This is in the same dubious ethical territory. In this case, CNN had a responsibility to inform the public that it was orchestrating questions and failed to do so.

In addition, the network controlling questions in order to control the ebb and flow of the tone of the program - serious at some points, light at others - has no place on a "news" network.

Then, too, one has to wonder about the news judgment of whoever was acting on the network's behalf. Follow-up questions serve an important function in informing the public. CNN's executive producer of the debate, Sam Feist, told the New York Times that the candidates had already spent ten minutes on Yucca Mountain. That's true, but those candidates did a fuzzy job of answering. Feist should be in another line of work if that's typical of his news judgment. Sandoval, not Feist, was acting in the interest of news by wanting to raise Yucca again.