= Way, Truth and Life. That job is taken.
Trump = Mere mortal and flawed sinner like you and me (but for now the best choice for POTUS).
Posted on 09/25/2016 2:52:38 PM PDT by TaxPayer2000
Blame tradition — and Abraham Lincoln.
If you don’t want Donald Trump to become president, you’ve probably fantasized about a debate moderator interrupting him and calling him out: "Here are the things you’ve said so far that aren’t true..."
But on the eve of the first debate, the head of the Commission on Presidential Debates, Janet Brown, crushed those daydreams into finely ground dust.
"I don't think it's a good idea to get the moderator into essentially serving as the Encyclopedia Britannica," she told CNN. In her view, it’s the candidates’ job to fact-check each other — not the moderator’s job to fact check them.
To Hillary Clinton and her supporters, this might seem like a betrayal. What it really is, though, is tradition.
The norm against fact-checking was famously broken in 2012, when Candy Crowley fact-checked a statement live during a Romney-Obama town hall debate. But as a general rule, presidential debate moderators don’t think fact-checking candidates is their job.
Just look to Fox News’s Chris Wallace, who’s moderating the third and last debate and has already said as much: "I do not believe it is my job to be a truth squad," he told Howard Kurtz in an interview earlier this month.
This isn’t a matter of a Fox News host giving favorable treatment to a Republican candidate; it’s a matter of a Commission-selected moderator giving the Commission’s line. Longtime debate moderators, including PBS’s Jim Lehrer (who’s moderated more debates than any other journalist), don’t feel moderator fact-checks are appropriate either.
At a glance, this probably seems naive at best and bonkers at worst. If the moderators aren’t supposed to call out candidates when they lie, what’s the point of having them there at all? The answer, though, is that the moderators really don’t think they ought to be there at all.
Since the very first televised presidential debate of 1960, moderators have been trying — and failing — to recreate the Lincoln/Douglas debates of 1858: two candidates on a stage, talking about their competing visions of America to the voters, may the best orator win.
It’s always been a romantic ideal. But it’s been a tradition for decades of debating. And when it comes to the hidebound world of presidential debates, the combination of "idealized discourse" and "revered tradition" is basically enough to guarantee that moderators will treat this election — and these candidates — just like any other.
A very brief history of debate moderators trying to make themselves disappear
If the media had had its way, the very first (and most famous) televised presidential debate wouldn’t have had moderators at all.
In 1960, the campaigns of Richard Nixon and John Kennedy came to an agreement with the major TV networks (at the time, CBS, NBC, and ABC) to debate each other on live TV. As Jill Lepore writes in a recent New Yorker feature, the biggest sticking point in negotiations wasn’t between Nixon and Kennedy but between the campaigns and the networks: "The networks wanted Nixon and Kennedy to question each other; both men insisted on taking questions from a panel of reporters."
As Lepore writes, CBS wasn’t even willing to call it a "debate," reserving the word for times when opponents actually directly debated each other. (Instead, they called it a "joint appearance.") But CBS lost both the battle and the war.
Televised presidential debates didn’t happen again until 1976. Every four years since then, what happens in fall is called a "debate." Every four years since then, it involves moderators. And every four years since then — or so it seems — the moderators try, and fail, to make themselves invisible and facilitate a conversation between the candidates.
It’s important to remember, particularly if you’re a politics superfan, that what you’re going to see during the general elections is very different from what we’ve seen so far this year. During the primaries — in particular the Republican primary — moderators had to assert their presence, as often as not, as traffic cops. They often had to negotiate among seven or eight (or, in the first debate, 16) different candidates so that everyone could get a word in edgewise and respond to direct attacks.
General election presidential debates are a dramatically different scene. With only a couple of exceptions, over the 40-year history of annual televised debates they’ve been one-on-one affairs. The moderators don’t have to do anything to ensure that each candidate gets ample time. As a matter of fact, the more the moderator steps in, the less time the candidates get.
As far as the moderators are concerned, fact-checking should absolutely happen — but it should be the candidates’ job to fact-check each other. During a discussion at the University of Notre Dame in September, Lehrer of PBS explained that if Trump lied about his opposition to the Iraq War during a debate, "all any moderator would have done is said, 'Senator Clinton?' And then she would have called him a liar. The moderator would never have to intrude."
Lehrer has long been a proponent of these exchanges, which in the past (back when major party nominees were all one gender) he called "man to man." But usually the candidates just don’t bite.
In 2008, when Barack Obama made a reference to John McCain, Lehrer interrupted: "Say it directly to him." Both candidates balked: "Are you afraid I couldn’t hear him?" McCain joked, and Obama simply skipped to the next phrase of his answer to avoid the situation entirely.
"I'm just determined to get you all to talk to each other," Lehrer said, exasperated. It’s been the motto of campaign moderators for the past 40 years.
The debates are supposed to be the discourse of a more genteel and rational America
According to the president of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which sets the rules for who qualifies for debates and how debates are formatted, often long before the candidates are even chosen, one of the criteria for selecting journalists to moderate the debates is this: "They need to understand for better or worse that their names are not on the ballot."
It’s a strong warning against moderators "intruding" (as experienced debate moderator Bob Schieffer of CBS put it at the Notre Dame event). But it’s also an illustration of how the commission sees itself and the debates: a unique opportunity to shut out the noise of the outside world and let the people whose names are on the ballot present their visions to America.
The ideal of debate that always gets brought up in these contexts is the Lincoln/Douglas debates, which weren’t presidential debates at all, since the candidates were running against each other for Senate at the time. (This meant they were campaigning on behalf of the state legislature candidates who’d elect a senator.)
Those debates were barely debates: One candidate would give a speech, then the other, then the first would give another speech. And they might have been forgotten to history entirely if Lincoln hadn’t then collected the texts into a book, bringing national attention to his oratory and helping him win the Republican nomination for president in 1860.
But it’s an attractive ideal, isn’t it? Two candidates, arguing their visions for America before a crowd, with no need for an external authority to keep them on message and civil. It’s nice to believe that’s the way democracy works.
In fact, it might even be particularly appealing during this cycle. The public complains that they don’t hear enough about the candidates’ policy proposals; what better way to fix that than to have the candidates discuss those plans with America themselves, rather than forcing them to talk about stupid horse race controversies? Matt Lauer got attacked for asking Hillary Clinton tough questions and Donald Trump softballs. If Clinton herself were responsible for pressuring Trump, wouldn’t that problem solve itself?
To see the problem with this logic, you have to see the difference between Clinton and Trump not just as a difference of shared values but as an absence of shared facts.
If the point of a presidential debate is to move the discussion between candidates beyond "he said/she said," that’s kind of the opposite of forcing the candidates to be responsible for correcting each other’s falsehoods. But as long as the presidential debates are ruled by the traditionalists, candidates will be expected to do both.
She was. But, Obama got her shot in, and Romney never recovered.
You could tell it was a setup, just by the smug look on Obama's face.
Categorical matters require a yes or no answer and are either true or false, e.g.
Did you say you would put W. VA coal miners out of work?
Did you say you would call for an Australian-type gun control system?
Specific questions about her tenure in the State dept. can hurt her, too, because we know the answers now.
There is no spinning such things.
Sure, they can believe, for example, like Dan Rather that something is “fake but accurate” but in these marvelous new internet times they can’t get away with it when John and Jane Doe, smack in the middle, see that the matter is one requiring an answer must be either black or white—that it cannot be gray.
And they see it because in a glasnost way it is repeated here, on America’s premiere gathering place for conservatives, and other places like FR where the “progressives” haven’t yet installed conformity with the NYT, DNC, RAT: Uniparty orthodoxy enforced with deletions, purging: down the ol’ memory hole. (see Amazon, Facebook, etc.).
They should ‘fact-check’ hillary.
That’d be a hot one.
Here's an excerpt of the facts from "Romney was RIGHT! Candy Crowley admits Mitt was correct to attack Obama over Libya killings..."- dailymail.co.uk:
Candy Crowley admitted that Mitt Romney was RIGHT to criticise Barack Obama for his response to the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi just hours after she apparently sided with Obama at a crucial point in the high drama presidential debate on Tuesday night.In short, Obama claimed he called Benghazi a terrorist act the next day when he didn't do so until 9 days later. But Crowley "fact-checked" Romney calling out that lie (over a claimed wrong word) and covered-up that Obama lie!The moderator's shock intervention, in which she cut Romney short when he claimed that Obama had failed to say the attack was the work of terrorists in the his Rose Garden statement the following day, has been met with outrage.
However, Crowley appeared to backtrack just a few hours after she left the GOP candidate exposed on the stage in front of millions of viewers. She admitted that Romney had been 'right in the main' but added that he had 'picked the wrong word'.
The row intensified when Michelle Obama was caught on camera applauding Crowley's intervention - despite rules banning members of the audience from clapping or otherwise showing support during the debate, which has been called the 'most rancorous' in history.
If the moderator were to pull a “fact-check” stunt.
Watch DJT tear into him or her, I’d bet he will call it out.
I've investigated several of the "fact check" ratings.
Their fatal flaw: overlooking facts that don't fit their narratives. Sometimes, it appears to be just ignorance. But, other times it's deliberate.
Case in point: Clinton claimed that she never sent/received anything "marked classified". She was given a "half true" rating, taking points off only because it was an "overly legalistic" claim.
But, it had already been widely reported that one of the emails still bore the (C) for Confidential. I called them out on that, along with a lot of other people. But, they refused to modify the rating. If they had actually talked to someone that had a US security clearance, it would have been explained to them. Or, you can get the document marking rules from public sources.
It wasn't until the FBI held their infamous press conference and explicitly stated there were scores of highly classified emails that still retained their markings. The fact-check rating was finally withdrawn and replaced with "False", claiming there was "new information".
They've also down-rated Trump, scoffing at his suggestion that Clinton's email breach led to the death of an Iranian defector. The fact-checker claims that the defectors plight was widely reported in the news, and that Clinton's email didn't offer any new information.
But, they obviously didn't ask anyone in the intelligence business. The Iranians are easily convinced that the US media lies for the US Government -- after all, that's exactly what Iranian media does. US journalists think everyone regards them as the ultimate arbiters of truth, and that no one could believe otherwise.
What they couldn't see is that Hillary's email confirmed they guy's concocted story of kidnapping by the CIA was fiction. Before that, it was a plausible story to the Iranians. And even though he wasn't explicitly named, it was obvious they were talking about him.
It's a classic example of how people try to "talk around" the non-disclosure rules on classified info in a non-secure environment. In my training, we actually listened to a fictional phone call where two people pretended to do that, and then dissected the conversation to show how much it revealed.
Illary essentially admits she cannot handle the Donald one on one by begging the moderator to take her side against Trump. She cannot win unless it’s two on one. Trump should be beating this drum on Twitter.
= Way, Truth and Life. That job is taken.
Trump = Mere mortal and flawed sinner like you and me (but for now the best choice for POTUS).
The thing that most people don't seem to understand is that the debate is already slanted in Grandma Nixon's favor no matter what happens on the stage, because liberal moderators make up the questions. Hillary will not be asked how she feels about Planned Parenthood selling baby parts, or what she was doing when Americans were being murdered in Benghazi, or what her husband could possibly have to say that would be worth first class travel, five star accommodations, and speaking fees in excess of $500,000.
In addition to removing the moderators, the debaters should ask each other their OWN questions. Until that happens, the conservative will always be operating at a YUGE disadvantage.
“This isn’t a matter of a Fox News host giving favorable treatment to a Republican candidate...”
I stopped reading right here. Anyone who thinks that a “Fox News host” is going to be favorable to Trump clearly hasn’t watched a second of it for the past six months.
Certainly not prissy Chrissy.
Good point.
Bull. The fact is a great many of these issues are in the gray area and should be left to the audience or competitor to determine not a debate referee. Their job is to ask the question and Maintain order.
Fox News stopped being “fair and balanced after Roger Ailes left. They just like to continue the mantra because it gets them ratings. They are more dangerous than the other networks because people know the others have a liberal bias. Fox News lulls people with that fair and balanced crap.
Lots of words - and, in fact, many sound pretty good.
But they are ALL BS.
Today’s media -every bloody damn one of them! - are DESPERATE to be the “one” who will be able to trap Trump in a phrase or inconvenient admission that will get him out of the race. NONE are even attempting to be credible nor honest nor even-handed.
NONE are unbiased - and the closer each gets to the pulpit and the “preaching” of superiority - such as this “holier-than-thou-art” they worse they become.
Yes, he got his basic “fact-checking” wrong about Candy Crowley.
But let’s face it. Hillary’s national press corpse does NOT “want” to fact check Hillary.
They don’t even want to have to “fact check” Hillary. They NEED DESPERATELY to be able to let Hillary get away with any lie she spews!
> There is no spinning such things.
Dems: rape is evil and accusers should be believed
Public: what about Bill’s accusers
Woopie: There’s rape and there’s “rape rape”
Clinton Supporters: Where do I get my presidential kneepads?
The Clinton’s spin EVERYTHING. And Clinton supporters go along happily.
Hopefully your view is what we get from the undecideds & independents. I’m worried that a majority of our country are happy to put on their kneepads and say it’s not rape.
Thanks for the complete article. I won’t give vox a click.
Nothing happened to CC. She is employed at Harvard. Libs look after their own.
Second, moderators are supposed to be, well, moderate and not become the center of attention like most of them have done in previous "debates".
Yes, Crowley was wrong.
I thought so...
That’s why the media has no business “fact checking” the candidates in real time.
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