Dome decided to enter the Magic Eight Ball in the Office Pool on the caucuses just now.

We decided to use a rock-paper-scissors process of elimination. We'd start by asking if John Edwards would win the Iowa caucuses.

Its answer: Concentrate and ask again.

We hummed a few bars of "This is Our Country" and asked once more.

Its answer: Concentrate and ask again.

We pictured John and Elizabeth and Emma Claire and Jack and millworkers and Breck shampoo and "John's Room" and Carla Babb and universal health care and UNC-Chapel Hill and hedge funds and the Lower Ninth Ward and ...

Its answer: Cannot predict now.

Carla Babb won that MTV contest after all.

The UNC-Chapel Hill student became briefly famous back in October when staffers for Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards tried to kill a piece she produced for Carolina Week.

The reason they saw the piece in the first place was that she posted it on YouTube before it aired in order to qualify for an MTV "Choose or Lose" campaign.

Today, MTV announced that it had chosen Babb to be one of 51 "citizen journalists" to cover the presidential and Congressional races this coming year. 

"We hope to find out whether or not our most important political event—the election of a president— matters to young people, and whether or not if matters more when it comes to them through the lens of their issues and the screen of their cell phone," said Eric Newton, vice president of journalism at the Knight Foundation, which is co-sponsoring the campaign.

He forgot YouTube.

Gary Pearce blames stress for the John Edwards' tussle with a UNC journalist.

On his Talking About Politics blog, the Democratic political operative writes that campaign staffers are "tightly wound" at this point in an election:

Blame stress. Perspective is the first thing to go among overworked, over-caffeinated, 20- and 30-something campaign staffers. 

Still, he says a campaign can't win by "going postal." The best thing to do is apologize and laugh off coverage that you don't like.

He also questioned the Edwards campaign's response that reporters sometimes don't love Edwards. 

"Reporters aren't supposed to love you," he wrote. "They're supposed to report on you." 

Carla Babb's piece had one other error.

In her Carolina Week segment, the UNC-Chapel Hill student says that "most presidential hopefuls this election have set up shop in Washington, D.C." while Edwards is in Chapel Hill.

As a Dome reader pointed out this afternoon, that's not accurate. In fact, 10 of the 15 major party candidates are based somewhere other than the nation's capital:

Barack Obama's in Chicago; Fred Thompson's in Nashville; Rudy Giuliani's in New York City; Mitt Romney's in Boston; Dennis Kucinich's in Cleveland; Joe Biden's in Wilmington, Del.; Bill Richardson is in Albuquerque, N.M.; Mike Huckabee's in Little Rock, Ark.; Duncan Hunter's in La Mesa, Calif.; and Alan Keyes is in Provo, Utah.

Only five candidates are in the D.C. area:

Hillary Clinton's in Arlington, Va., as is Mike Gravel and Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo is in Vienna, Va.; and Chris Dodd is in Washington.

Journalism professors stand by Carla Babb's decision to hold her ground.

But at least one pointed out that her Carolina Week piece on John Edwards' campaign headquarters was not entirely accurate, either. 

In an e-mail to Dome, UNC-Chapel Hill professor Phil Meyer noted that it's not accurate to say that Southern Village is "the most affluent area in Chapel Hill."

Based on a quick review of million-dollar homes for sale, he argues that the Governor's Club neighborhood (nine), Meadowmont (six) and the downtown (five) are the most affluent.

"The number of million-dollar homes offered in Southern Village? Zero," he wrote.

Meyer notes that there are 86 properties listed for over a million dollars in Chapel Hill.

"Perhaps his student critics could develop a mapping algorithm that would identify all available office spaces with no million-dollar homes within walking distance, say 4,000 feet," he writes. "While they are at it, they could also make sure there are no upscale shopping centers nearby." 

Carla Babb's report on John Edwards will air tonight.

But the UNC-Chapel Hill journalism student's piece is probably already the most-watched Carolina Week segment in history, thanks to YouTube.

By Friday morning, her piece had only been viewed about 300 times online. As Dome and the Associated Press reported on it, it slowly moved up to about 2,000 by dinnertime.

Then, in a few short hours, it jumped to 20,000, then 30,000 and finally hit 53,000 shortly before midnight, thanks in part to a link from The Drudge Report.

Over the weekend, the numbers kept accumulating, in part due to coverage in The New York Times and the N&O and links from blogs.

By 10:30 a.m. today, the video had been seen 145,525 times.

A New York Times blog says the paper will be keeping an eye on Carla Babb.

In The Caucus, reporter Sarah Wheaton writes: 

Meanwhile, we’ll be watching the career of a Chapel Hill journalism student who drew the ire of the Edwards campaign with a critical piece. On the one hand, she’s already taking flak from a high-level flack. On the other hand, she’s already getting attention from a presidential campaign and other major media. But in any case, the fact that the Edwards camp is reacting to a YouTube piece, in the words of so many, “speaks for itself.”

Carla Babb said she was "shocked" when John Edwards' campaign called her and asked her to take a news story off the Internet.

The UNC-Chapel Hill graduate student said her professor had approved the script for a news segment on Edwards' headquarters, and she thought it was balanced when she posted it on YouTube Tuesday night.

But the next morning, Edwards' campaign spokeswoman Colleen Murray called her cell phone.

"She said this sounds like it came straight from the Republican Party," Babb said. "She was like, 'This has to come down.'"

Babb was surprised to hear that online commenters — like this one — had attacked her for being a registered Republican. She pointed out that she interned as an undergraduate student for U.S. Rep. Bob Etheridge, a Democrat.

"My political affiliation isn't in any of my stories," she said.

An MTV news contest indirectly spurred a tussle between John Edwards and UNC-Chapel Hill's journalism school.

Carla Babb, a graduate student at UNC, posted a news segment for the student-run Carolina Week program on YouTube Tuesday in order to meet the deadline for a "Choose or Lose" contest run by the cable network.

The segment is slated to air Monday, but two Edwards staffers complained when they saw it online.

Professor C.A. Tuggle, who oversees the program and previously worked as a TV reporter in Florida, said the show is normally seen by around 2,000 people, though it airs on cable in 16 counties. He said individual segments, such as one Babb did on state troopers' misconduct, occasionally get up to 1,000 views on YouTube as well.

After they saw the piece, two top Edwards staffers called Tuggle. He said they demanded the piece be pulled and threatening to cut off access for UNC reporters and other student groups.

"My gosh, what are they thinking?" he said. "They're spending this much time and effort on a student newscast that has about 2,000 viewers? They're turning a molehill into a mountain."

A news segment from a UNC-Chapel Hill student that John Edwards' campaign tried to have pulled.