The media narrative will be exactly that... that he was afraid of being labeled as unfair toward Hillary and too easy on Trump. I’m surprised there is not more discussion of the tactics of the collusion here. Let’s take liberals at face value for a moment and interpret what it actually means:
1) they TRULY believe Lauer posed more difficult questions to Hillary in the CiC Forum than to Trump.
2) they truly believe Lauer did not do an adequate job fact-checking Trump on-the-fly during the CiC Forum.
ok, why is that important?
3) not only does it provide cover for Holt to show bias toward Clinton in the first real debate since the narrative has been laid that the CiC Forum was unfair in favor of Trump, it gets the hard questions for Hillary out of the way BEFORE the first debate, BEFORE Trump is there to aggressively counter her lies. Holt no longer needs to go down the email & Benghazi line of questioning... ‘afterall, Lauer covered that last time, and as we all know, he was very aggressive toward Hillary.’
4) NOT aggressively going after Trump on his statements in the CiC Forum, left the door open to ‘factcheck’ him and demand they be revisited at the next ‘debate’... this is exactly what happened with Trump’s statements on his Iraq war stance.
The whole thing is a setup... not just tonight, but the whole series of debates has been a collusion amongst the MSM (including FNC) and the political establishment. The plan thus far has to been to broach the difficult questions for Hillary during the CiC Forum when Trump is not there to counter... complain the moderator was unfair to setup debate 1... revisit Trumps answers to allow Hillary to counter and keep Trump on the defensive in debate 1. So, the question needs to be asked, what is the next element of their grand plan? My guess would be that Raddatz and Cooper play the racist/sexist/homophobe card all night long, likely with a few LBGTQ service-members or gold-star parents of the same among the town-hall crowd... Raddatz and Cooper will make no effort to be impartial as it will be expected/advertised that with an FNC personality hosting the last debate, things should balance out. In the last debate, Trump will feel the pressure to be on the attack, will largely succeed with no help from Wallace, and will be roundly accosted for being too aggressive in his treatment of a ‘lady’ and demonstrating the lack of temperament expected of the POTUS.
Sound about right?
Your scenario is plausible.
I will add that another element of my take on the feigned outrage directed at Lauer for his tough questioning of media darling Hillary is that her performance was lackluster because she was ill that week. Dehydration, pneumonia, whatever.
It became important to attack Lauer to distract from the fact that Clinton was too feeble to make a good showing during that forum.