Worst. Moderators. Ever?

January 16, 2008

While political observers are understandably divided about who “won” last night’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas, it seems everyone who watched can come together in agreement on one underlying point: the moderators were truly awful.

About a half-hour into the debate, an angry man started shouting, interrupting the event while security personnel intervened. Usually, these protestors are easy to dismiss as random nuts, but in this case, the heckler had a legitimate beef.

About 22 minutes into the Nevada Democratic debate, a heckler in the audience interrupted the proceedings, saying “these are f**cking race-based questions coming from you two, these are race-based questions…”

There was silence from the candidates and the moderators for about eight seconds with no mention of the heckler. Tim Russert, continued with his question for Sen. Hillary Clinton which focused on her characterization that Sen. Obama “is raising false hopes.”

I’ve seen debates in which hecklers jeer candidates, and I’ve seen debates in which hecklers take a stand for one issue or another, but this was the first debate I’ve seen in which a heckler went after a moderator. Worse, I think the guy was probably right.

Within a few minutes of the interruption, Ezra said, “It’s almost impossible for me to convey the damage Tim Russert and Brian Williams are doing to the republic this evening…. It’s literally the worst moderation I’ve yet seen. It’s not moderation. It’s trivialization. 28 minutes in, there’s not been a question about any issue, any cause, any problem.”

I’m not sure if I’m prepared to say it was literally the worst I’ve seen — the CNN debate in November was pretty offensive — but by any reasonable measure, last night was breathtakingly bad.

The first question of any substance came 40 minutes into the event. 40. The entire debate was two hours long, which means Tim Russert, Brian Williams, and NBC’s Natalie Morales (who was relegated to reading emails to the candidates) spent the first third of the debate covering nothing but process, politics, and horserace.

Russert, in particular, wanted to explore the race-based dispute between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in extraordinary detail. I’ve seen some suggestions that Obama and Clinton looked tired last night. My take was entirely different — they were bored by questions about an issue they were prepared to forget.

At one point, Morales asked John Edwards, “[W]hat is a white male to do running against these historic candidacies?” People laughed, and if you listened closely, you could Clinton say, “Poor John.” I agreed wholeheartedly, except I was also thinking, “Poor us.”

On and on it went. Robert Johnson. “Buddy system.” The black vote. The woman vote. “Likable enough.” Russert added: “I want to ask each of you quickly, your greatest strength, your greatest weakness.” I half-expected him to ask each of them to explain what kind of tree they’d be.

When the debate finally got to the substance, the moderators were hardly any better. Russert screwed up the Iraq/2013 point badly. The ROTC question was silly. Russert inexplicably suggested Edwards shouldn’t talk to Musharraf in Pakistan. The last question of the night asked when the candidates decided to run for president — as if that were important.

The candidates keep getting better in these debates. The moderators keep getting worse.

Forgive me for being a purist, but these events are not debates. We have yet to see a debate.

  • Russert, Williams, et al, have their marching orders. The corporate honchos don’t want an intelligent, adult substantive discussion, and thus we don’t get one. They see politics as entertainment, not as an exercise in democracy. Voters are being treated like children: patronized and entertained; the grown-ups will make the decisions after you’ve gone to dead, dear. Of course the candidates validate this horseshit by going along with it and not strenuously objecting.

    The dumbing down continues.

  • Oh why can’t they just let Keith run these things? Maybe with David Gregory helping.

    There is a reason I mostly skip Russert’s show on Sunday, and this just illustrates it.

  • Whatever these events are, debates or not, there are too many of them. Too many for the attention span of the average media personality, that is. They’ve followed the race too closely and think they’ve heard it all, so they try to keep the narrative interesting for themselves by asking bullshit questions.

    Now, the reason for having dozens of debates (or whatever) is to give Americans more opportunities to see them in different times and places. Voters might see only one debate or five, but not all of them. Media personalities see them all, so they blur together into one big debate.

    My theory doesn’t hold up for characters like Steve, who watches debates so I don’t have to. How do you stay interested?

  • I was struck by the ROTC military recruiter question. My answer would have been “Tim I don’t agree with your characterization of the law.” Could someone tell me what law he was discussing.

  • “…and NBC’s Natalie Morales (who was relegated to reading emails to the candidates)…”

    And I wonder if some of them were even real e-mails, planted questions if you will. The one from some lady who’s sole income was nothing but dividend and interest income stood out for me. I would bet dollars to donuts that that question was either fake or a plant from some female who sits on, or the wife of someone who sits on, GE’s or a similar corporation’s board of directors.

  • Mike, exactly. I have yet to see a debate and I am tired of what is taking place. Until we can get someone to ask questions about things that matter (my biggest question is whether each candidate will revoke all the signing statements and executive orders. Would someone please ask that? Who gives a crap what their childhood dog’s name was???), these “debates” are so off my radar I could care less.

    I don’t know how Steve does it. I’d want to blow my brains out if I had to watch that drivel. UGH!

  • The closest thing to a real debate I have witnessed was on National Public Radio, where they focused on 3 issues for the entire time, spending about 40 minutes on each. That was a refreshingly substance-filled debate.

  • It’s not really surprising. If you were trying to pick smug, clueless insiders obsessed with their own insideriness, and convinced that their obsession with trivia and personality was insightful and cutting edge analysis, you couldn’t, in all the Beltway, pick two humps who fit the bill better than Russert and Williams. Truly the worst of the worst. Not least because Williams so clearly patterns himself after Russert.

  • for anyone who watches MTP, russert’s modus operandi is to employ his lawyerly entrapment skills to focus on fringe issues that ‘raise reasonable doubts’ in the minds of the viewers yet have nothing of consequence to do with the substanitive issues. e.g., question he asked ron paul, “so you would let iran attack israel”, knowing full well what answer he’s fishing for, in spite of the fact that israel has 300 nuclear warheads and that’s a non-issue. and given the opportunities to ask the truly tough follow-up questions, he’s always staring at his list of questions in an effort to get them all asked.

    and brian williams? i think he’d make a great press secretary for mitt romney.

  • Kevin Drum references Matt Yglesias’s assessment of Tim Russert last year: “Viewers watch a candidate getting grilled by Russert not to assess the candidate’s views but to assess his or her ability to withstand the grilling.”

    Which means the content of the questions is beside the point.

  • Americans’ brains no longer function. TeeVee has reduced us to occipital lobes only. Appearance is all that counts, and having a woman and a black appear is, for the moment, novel. So our occipital lobes notice. For the moment.

    It’s a truism in stagecraft that sets and costumes are noticed for about a minute, if that. Immediately there’d better be a story developing or we’ll turn off. Someday our leaders — political and network TeeVee — will absorb this truism. Then the fun might begin.

  • “I’m a middle-class American who gets most of my income from dividends and capital gains. If elected would you raise my taxes?”

    HELL YES!

  • They copied the look of the relatively decent ABC News NH debate, but couldn’t help but be themselves on the substance (note the word relatively). As with CNN, NBC has people qualified to moderate these debates. Instead they chose to hand them over to their stars, who are as concerned with their “performance” as the event itself. The debates have become nothing but publicity vehicles for the networks’ big names. The candidates are almost secondary to the preening. It’s just par-for-the-course from an election season where big media has somehow managed to act even more disgracefully then we’ve come to expect.

  • These questions seem more designed to provoke people into picking candidates for the wrong reasons instead of for the right ones. If Russert is really a good journalist, he should note it and cry “foul” on the questions himself.

    Do the candidates really want this? Can’t they tell the networks, “Hey, no more of these hack moderators and inane questions?” Can’t they come up with a process to pick a good moderator (rule 1: no talking heads) and new, fair questions? This kind of debate is not serving the American public.

  • OMG – I must be exactly what Ed’s talking about! I watched the debate last night – I don’t, usually – and didn’t even pay much attention to the moderators. I was concentrating on the candidates, who I thought all did a good job. So good, in fact, that I’m STILL undecided.

    Of course, we do know that these are NOT true debates. A “debate” would involve the candidates actually responding to one another with little or no outside prompting. Lincoln and Douglas are probably turning over in their graves, etc.

    I did like the point where the candidates were able to ask one other one a question. That came the closest to a true debate. I’ve come to realise that the “debates” are usually “beauty contests” where the candidates answer canned questions with canned answers.
    Totally worthless, as such.

    BTW, what AM I going to do on Feb 5th? Anybody got a suggestion?

  • It’s obvious tha MSNBC’s attitude is that “it’s our network and we’ll get answers to our questions before we get to the voting public”s.” Their questions are the kind that feed the scripts and topics chosen by the likes of Russert and Matthews. They aren’t interested in the real problems of this Country, only of their networks competitive position and profit. We shouldn’t be surprised. We get what we pay for.

  • One of the candidates needs to call them out on this. “No one cares about this stuff besides you, Tim. Voters want to hear about how we’re going to end this war, fix the economy, and solve all the problems that have cropped up over the past seven years under this administration.”

    The hall would explode in applause.

  • I’m sorry to have to say that – outside of Helen Thomas – I can’t think of any “good reporters” who aren’t either long-retired or dead.

  • The faint praise is that Russert (a.k.a. – Pumpkinhead) has a bit of character when Chris Matthew (a.k.a. – Tweety) has ZERO character/integrity.

  • I wonder what Kevin Drum’s take is on all this. I’d bet that according to him, Hillary Clinton somehow caused the hapless Tim Russert to ask the questions.

    Drum should write a fan-fic piece about Russert on his blog, too. Something along the lines of, Russert is caught in the middle of a love-triangle (two hot twenty-something ladies are competing for him) and has to maneuver through it while relentlessly doing some single-handed investigative journalism to uncover Al Gore’s bid to revitalize the tobacco industry.

    He can put it right above the cat blogging.

    Kevin, I think you can find some authentic-reproduction swastika armbands on e-bay, if you’re interested. You can wear them around the house, and when you go out, to show everyone what you’re made of (shit).

  • Hey– 40 minutes into the show– isn’t that about when most Americans are likely to get bored and stop watching? We’ve all heard that statistic about this kind of a debate, right?

    So even if you were making a sincere effort to inform yourself about the issues and the candidates, the format of the show was designed, based on your own psychology, to defeat you in that purpose.

  • another example of the way political press works: after spending a week simulatenously fanning the Clinton/Obama identity flames and castigating the candidates for engaging in the fight the media itself egged on, MSNBC.com presently has this as a subhead on its story about the debate:

    First Read: Have the Dem candidates gone soft?

    Well, at least they’ve shown their true colors. All they want is the food fight.

  • 22. On January 16th, 2008 at 1:24 pm, Buddha Blaze Champion said:
    I wonder what Kevin Drum’s take is on all this. [endless ad hominem attack redacted]

    What the frell are you talking about? You do realize this is not Kevin’s blog, he didn’t write this, and your illogical irrational attack on him has no bearing on the topic at hand?

    Are you trying to justify the inane Republican’t-spun questions that Pumpkinhead was asking during the debates? Throwing a rhetorical turd in the punch bowl? (you missed…)

    I’d bet that you have no freaking clue at all about anything you project onto Mr. Drum. And your mind reading skills (not to mention your trying-to-speak-for-others-you-have-no-clue-about skills) need some work.

    Ahem. ‘Scuse me. To the topic at hand:

    I, too, would love to see one or more of the Democratic debaters rhetorically smack Republican’t shills who are moderating Democratic debates. But wouldn’t it be nice to see clueless morans like Russert do the same thing to the Republican’ts for a change? “Mr. Paul – are you more racist than Mr. Brownback? Or do you like doing the Latino womens on the side?”

  • I wonder if the networks should be considered to be on audition for the General Election debates in the fall, because frankly I think a lot of them are phoning it in.

  • Still, the candidates allowed themselves to be treated this way. Did these candidates have no questions or criticisms for the networks news and campaign coverage?
    “When did you first decide to run for president?”
    “What difference does that make? In the whole scheme of things what difference does it make when I first decided to run for president? I would think the question should be when I decided that we needed a change in the WH? Let me address that question. It wasn’t just the mistakes we made in foreign policy or the drive toward economic collapse that….”

    The point is …the candidates should have driven the moderators instead of patiently standing there saying …”shoot the apple off my head Tim, come on shoot the apple off my head”. Hopefully they will have learned from this experience so next time the moderators keep asking stupid questions they will be able to take hold and turn the questioning toward real issues. Remember…only NBC says these moderators are competent…they are appointed by their CEOs and really have little relevance to the population’s thinking. Russert and Williams have no accomplishments to speak of. They’ve done nothing that qualifies them to moderate political debates and have demonstrated they are no better at it than the average Joe on the street.
    I say again…candidates should not allow themselves to be treated this way, like HS students on prom night.

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