It’s time to end presidential debates…
…and a few other media topics
I tried. I really tried to watch the GOP presidential candidate debate this week, but I couldn’t do it. After 15 minutes, I turned it off. I felt a need to protect my sanity. Watching adults talk over each other, yell to get attention, call each other schoolyard insulting names, and, oh yeah, stretch the truth – is not conducive to anyone’s mental health.
Perhaps Ron DeSantis said it best in a post-debate interview when he said, “If I was at home watching that, I would have changed the channel.”
Even when the bedlam stopped long enough for one candidate to speak at a time, all I heard were well-rehearsed one-liners designed to get some sound bite time in later newscasts. None of the candidates come across as real people. DeSantis has his painfully forced smile. Ramaswamy will be the most annoying guy in any room. Poor Mike Pence seems like yesterday’s news. Chris Christie is a good debater, but with Trump not on stage, it’s pointless. And he’s not even running in Iowa, so he’s going nowhere. Nikki Haley at least tries to answer the questions and deliver some hard truths. But the bickering and juvenile behavior should make all of us feel sick to our stomachs about the future of our country.
The audience should not be allowed to applaud answers. It wastes time. It influences the television audience at home. In every political debate I planned, the audience was asked to applaud politely when the candidates came on stage and at the end. Otherwise, please be quiet. Once, when going over the rules with the audience just before we went on air, I said “Please, no clapping. No laughing, No booing. You may breathe and you may blink your eyes, but do it quietly.”
I don’t have a lot of empathy for anyone at Fox News, but I did feel sorry for the moderators. I don’t know what else they could do to enforce debate rules that all the campaigns agreed to beforehand, only to have the candidates routinely ignore them. Maybe cut off the microphones of candidates who won’t shut up. Maybe arm the moderators with stun guns.
It’s time for these high-profile debates to end. The format doesn’t work anymore, especially when the front-runner stays home and doesn’t have to defend his record. I can’t imagine there were many Americans who watched last night’s debacle and made up their minds who to support. There must be a better way to inform Americans.
An effective alternative
One of the most effective political interview techniques I’ve seen was led by the longtime CBS News correspondent Marvin Kalb, who in the late 1980s, would bring presidential aspirants into a room filled with students at Harvard University. The series aired on PBS. One candidate for one hour. Kalb would ask substantive questions. Candidates gave serious answers. Then students would question the candidate. No raised voices. No trick questions. I always felt I got a good sense of the candidate’s abilities. I don’t know if Americans have the attention span for the format anymore. I never felt like taking a shower after watching one of the programs.
What DO voters want?
New research indicates most American news viewers want journalists to ask tough, but respectful questions of candidates. And they want candidate answers fact-checked.
The study of 2,000 American news consumers was conducted in June by the Marion, Iowa, based research firm Magid for the Radio-Television Digital News Directors Association.
The study reveals 62% of local news users say it’s “very important” to ask tough, respectful questions, and 61% say it’s important to fact-check the answers.
News consumers says local newsrooms can increase trust by having “people in the story that represent all sides of the story”, “researching the candidate’s past actions/votes on these issues”, and offering “experts on the topic that help explain the issues.” Those all sound like pretty basic elements of good political coverage but journalists are really pressed for time these days and sometimes the basics get lost.
What about Bob?
The next time any politician in Iowa mentions “the weaponization of the Biden Justice Department”, every journalist – indeed every citizen should respond with the following short question. “How do you explain Bob Menendez?”
It doesn’t matter if the weaponization trope comes from a visiting Republican candidate for president, from Governor Reynolds or Donald Trump himself. No reporter – noBODY - should ever again let a politician make the statement unchallenged. It’s been a false allegation from the beginning and it’s time to put a stop to it.
The Biden Justice Department has indicted U.S. Senator Robert Menendez – a Democrat. The allegations are stunning. Menendez and his wife stand accused of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes, some of it in the form of gold bullion bars. The indictment says he was paid the bribes both to help New Jersey businessmen and to increase U.S. support for Egypt.
Democrats in the Senate – even New Jersey’s Democratic governor – have called on Menendez to resign. Contrast that with Republicans who defend Trump’s FOUR criminal indictments. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds said “…the Biden administration’s weaponization of the Justice Department will diminish Americans’ confidence in law enforcement institutions for decades to come.”
It should be clear to all now that the Justice Department is doing its job by investigating corruption and bringing indictments if there’s enough evidence, regardless of party. Journalists should simply ignore any politician who makes the weaponization argument. It’s not true. Leave it out of the story. And any citizen who hears a politician say it should be asked, “what about Bob?”
I’m honored to be part of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative, offering commentary from around Iowa at a time of reduced editorial voices in traditional media.
Debates have evolved into debacles. Clown shows. Seems they intentionally behave badly to create sound bites, add excitement or gain ratings. It's not working. It's embarrassing.
You took the words right out of my mouth. Totally agree with a few teeny additions:
* Fox (or its moderators) should be ashamed that Trump questions were apparently taboo. On the day that Trump was ruled in a court case as a fraud (and he's leading polls by wide margins), that silence was incredible. I'd like to know who has the sense, or the courage, to call out a con man in plain English.
* The news media (especially the right-wing echo chamber) should get blamed for its journalistic failure to report lies and half-truths. But a candidate claims something crazy and they don't care if the "lamestream media" reports so because their media allies will not call it out and those viewers will likely never know the difference.
* I'd be in favor of quality, solo interviewers (give me Jonathan Swan) in a one-on-one for a half hour. No need to be done the same night. Citizens could more easily sort out the wheat from the chaff.