It was a gas for liberals in the national media to watch the massive field of candidates pick each other apart at the debates during the 2016 Republican primaries. Now that Democrats are in the same position, the novelty seems to have worn off.
CNN is the easiest target for criticism. Outside of maybe two shows, the network doesn’t have much to offer. But the whining over the Democratic debate formats and the moderators is both irritating and mostly fake.
Take the op-ed page of the Washington Post this week.
“Time-wasting,” “overproduced,” “too focused on creating made-for-TV conflict.”— Jennifer Rubin
“[The] disinterest in foreign policy is partly the fault of CNN, which organized this week’s debates. The moderators posed only a few questions that touched on Afghanistan.”— David Ignatius
“This week’s encounter, hosted by CNN, was structured to maximize conflict and minimize clarity.”— Eugene Robinson
Here’s a piece of trivia: All three of those writers are also paid contributors at MSNBC. I wonder if they have any particular reason at all to attack their network’s competitor. Nah, I’m sure that, per usual, they’re just calling it like they see it.
But there were others who also crapped on CNN for any number of other abstract reasons.
The candidates didn’t get enough time. The moderators interrupted. Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein reprimanded Jake Tapper for having the poor sense to “insist that the candidates stick to a portion of a topic that he found interesting (such as whether their healthcare plans would involve increases in taxes for the middle class).”
The nerve! Why on Earth would a debate moderator insist that candidates for president of the United States remain on topic and answer frivolous questions like, Will your multitrillion-dollar healthcare plan increase taxes on the average family?
It’s not the moderators who were responsible for creating “made-for-TV conflict.” Or was it Dana Bash who demanded New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker blurt out the corny line about Kool-Aid? Don Lemon has a lot of problems, but he didn’t force Sen. Bernie Sanders to flail his arms around, wild-eyed, as though hit by a dark psychic force from Marianne Williamson.
Yes, the moderators are tasked with crafting questions that will hopefully expose legitimate differences in both style and substance between the candidates. They did that and we learned a lot. We learned that Democrats, other than former Vice President Joe Biden, are ready to dump on Obama’s legacy. We learned that Sen. Kamala Harris of California can’t defend her own healthcare plan without lying. And we learned that one of Biden’s proposal to fix the border crisis mirrors the same policy that the White House is considering right now.
We learned all of that and more from the debates.
I don’t seem to recall any liberals, in the media or otherwise, attacking Fox News moderators of the 2016 primary debates when they were openly bragging about instigating conflict between the candidates or even aggressively confronting Donald Trump.
“Trump, you know he wants to go after people,” Fox News anchor Chris Wallace said before one of the debates at the time. “And you can be sure there will be a moment — whether it’s in my questioning or Bret’s or Megyn’s, where somebody is going to give him a fat juicy ball right in there so he can go after [Jeb] Bush and see how he responds to it. It’s sort of like playing three-dimensional checkers.”
After the debate, anchor Bret Baier told the Los Angeles Times that he had planned a “nuclear option” to address Trump, had the candidate violated any of the format’s rules. “Mr. Trump, in your business you have rules,” Baier said he would have told him. “You follow rules. We have rules on this stage. We don’t want to have to escort you to the elevator outside this boardroom.”
Where was the moaning about the “time-wasting” and “overproduced” format back then?
There wasn’t any. When it was Republicans at war with each other, liberals didn’t seem to care too much about formats and “made-for-TV conflict.” Back then, they loved it. Now the shoe’s on the other foot.
