Wednesday night, NBC hosted a presidential forum on issues related to national security and the military where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were interviewed and took selected questions from military personnel in attendance. Today host Matt Lauer served as moderator.
If you read media reports about the forum, the event was a total fiasco. Not because Clinton did poorly—and she did—but because Lauer was totally unfair to her. A good summary of this bizarre take on events can be found on the Washington Post‘s Thursday morning under the headline: “Matt Lauer’s widely-panned performance shows the perils for debate moderators“:
“No one” is happy with Matt Lauer’s performance as debate moderator? A better way of phrasing that would be to note that “no one in the Washington media establishment” is happy with it, because plenty of Trump fans were probably happy that Clinton bombed Wednesday night.
As for the consensus that Trump repeated his lie that he was against the war in Iraq, well, that’s nonsense. Don’t get me wrong. Trump lied (again), and that’s bad. Maybe Lauer should have pressed him on it.
But Lauer also didn’t press Clinton on her mendacious email answers either. When Hillary Clinton was asked by a naval flight officer why she skated on violating classified rules when the questioner “would have been prosecuted and imprisoned,” Clinton responded about how this was all a silly misunderstanding about the use of classified headers, wrapping it all up with the jaw dropping claim that “I did exactly what I should have done and I take it very seriously, always have, always will.” Earlier in the forum she made the Clintonian dodge that “none of the e-mails sent or received by me had such a header.”
Lauer did not press her on the fact that Clinton specifically asked aides to remove classified headers, thus ensuring she wouldn’t send emails marked as classified. (Never mind that it’s still illegal to traffic classified email with or without headers.) Nor did Lauer follow up and ask Clinton how she squares “I did exactly what I should have done” with an earlier admission that “it was a mistake to have a personal account. I would certainly not do it again. I make no excuses for it. It was something that should not have been done.”
And this wasn’t just the Washington Post. Politico noted: “Media turn on Lauer for not fact-checking Trump.” Who exactly are “the media” in this case? Politico‘s Hadas Gold, the consensus from “the media” includes citing partisan liberal columnists to condemn Lauer, without noting a single conservative:
CNN’s media critic Dylan Byers at least took a more expansive view, noting that Lauer’s performance was “widely panned by journalists and pundits.” Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter claimed on CNN the reaction was “universally negative.” But just how universal were the condemnations? Here is a complete list of the “journalists and pundits” Byers cited by name: Nicholas Kristof (again), Slate’s William Saletan, former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau, New York’s Jonathan Chait, Paul Krugman (again), longtime Clinton adviser Paul Begala, and just one lone Republican: Tim Miller, former spokesman for Jeb Bush and John Huntsman’s presidential campaigns.
Both Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof were cited by Politico and CNN. Krugman authored a column on Monday before the debate whingeing that the media have been too hard on Clinton. The column was so shameless even commentators on the Left described Krugman’s column as part of an “Unrelenting Pundit-Led Effort to Delegitimize All Negative Reporting About Hillary Clinton.” Kristof’s Twitter feed is similarly filled with defenses of Clinton that are at odds with the facts. And if nearly all of the criticism being cited comes from liberal columnists and Democratic operatives, how can we say Lauer was “widely panned” much less “universally” condemned?
Why are the media are piling on Lauer here? The answer was right there in the Post’s headline about the “the perils for debate moderators.” Hillary Clinton’s performance Wednesday was abysmal, and it’s easier to spin Trump’s lesser lies about relatively inconsequential lies like whether he supported the Iraq War as a private citizen. Clinton’s allies in the media are suddenly very worried that she’s going to bomb in the debates, and the best way to improve her chances is to make the debate moderators afraid to answer tough questions about her many lies.
