The Hillary Camp Is Demanding The Moderators Carry Her Water

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Jim Geraghty:

The message from Hillary Clinton’s camp in the run-up to Monday night’s debate is pretty clear: Moderator Lester Holt should call Donald Trump on any lies, mistakes, or factual errors.

“It’s unfair to ask that Hillary Clinton both play traffic cop with Trump, make sure that his lies are corrected, and also to present her vision for what she wants to do for the American people,” Robbie Mook said on ABC News’s This Week yesterday. This morning, he continued to beat the drum in an appearance on CBS: “We are concerned Trump may lie and throw misinformation out there and that Hillary will have to spend all her time trying to correct the record.”

Go find a presidential candidate who ever felt that his opponent was honest and would never lie. Every candidate who has ever stood on a debate stage believed his foe was uniquely slippery and deceitful. Every candidate wishes the moderator would instantaneously challenge his opponent’s every line, effectively handing a debate win to one candidate.

In short, Hillary Clinton’s campaign is expressly calling for Lester Holt and the other moderators to follow the trail blazed by former CNN correspondent Candy Crowley in 2012. In Republican circles, Crowley’s name is an epithet, the clearest example of a mainstream-media figure jumping on a metaphorical grenade for a Democrat since Dan Rather, because of this exchange:

ROMNEY: I want to make sure we get that for the record, because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.

OBAMA: Get the transcript.

CROWLEY: It- it- it- . . . he did in fact, sir. So let me — let me call it an act of terror . . .

OBAMA: Can you say that a little louder, Candy?

CROWLEY: He — he did call it an act of terror. It did as well take — it did as well take two weeks or so for the whole idea of there being a riot out there about this tape to come out. You are correct about that.

Crowley’s word-salad back-tracking didn’t mitigate the damage; she declared Obama right and Romney wrong, as the president’s gloating “say that a little louder” emphasizes.

Romney was, of course, correct that the administration dragged its feet in acknowledging the obvious, muddying the waters around the coverage of Benghazi by portraying it as an out-of-control protest, as if rocket-propelled grenades were a common tool of protesters. After the debate, Crowley said of Romney, “He was right in the main, but I just think he picked the wrong word.” Of course, the audience for CNN’s post-debate programming was a tiny fraction of the audience for the actual debate.

The Clinton campaign wants last cycle’s glaring anomaly to be the new normal; thus all the sudden talk about how a moderator has to fact-check a candidate’s statements while the debate is going on and call him out on any falsehoods or inaccuracies.

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media whores
Start reading foreign newspapers

The message from Hillary Clinton’s camp in the run-up to Monday night’s debate is pretty clear: Moderator Lester Holt should call Donald Trump on any lies, mistakes, or factual errors.

That’s exactly what a moderator should do. These are are supposed to be three moderated, one-on-one debates between the two candidates for president, kept to factual information and rational arguments to the fullest extent possible. They’re not intended to be free 90-minute propaganda opportunities. If that’s what we want to see, we might as well waste 90 minutes watching paid political advertisements.

@Greg:

Moderators, especially those from the left wing media are not the least bit impartial. Their biases are glaringly obvious.

We would be better served were the debates unmoderated. Moderators are not necessary.

Of course they are, if you want an orderly, useful discussion. They’re as necessary as police are to an orderly society—because some people don’t know how to behave.

So why no questions to the hildabeast about the email scandal, or donations to the money laundering foundation, or Benghazi.

In the instance last night, the debate moderator failed in seeking the truth in any number of areas regarding the hildabeast.A

@July 4th American, #5:

Because the function of the debate was not to further your propaganda war against Hillary Clinton. It was to clarify the position of candidates with regard to actual issues facing the nation they each hope to lead.

They were asked the same questions by the moderator. You can find those questions listed here.

Trump was asked for clarifying details when his initial response evaded the question that was put to him. He has a habit of doing that. The moderator didn’t intend to let him get away with evasions.

A full transcript can be found here, along with a video of the entire debate.

@Greg: Dim wit! The whole purpose of a debate is for the debaters to fact check each other. The moderator is there to pose the questions and to monitor the time. You obviously have never been in a debate have you? Actually, you have no experience at all. You just make things up as you go along!

The whole purpose of a debate is for the debaters to fact check each other.

Your high school debate club may have had such standardized rules, but they don’t apply to a nationally televised presidential debate. The format and structure were defined beforehand. The moderator’s style and approach were left up to the moderator, but it was known ahead of time that he wouldn’t allow demonstrably non-factual statements to go unchallenged. This affected Trump more than Clinton because Trump routinely makes far more non-factual statements than Clinton. Unlike the situation at his rallies, where anything he wants to say slips by without comment, there was a knowledgeable moderator in charge to point such non-factual statements out.

@Greg:

They were asked the same questions by the moderator.

No, they were not. her thighness should have been asked about he lack of trust when it come to her server and email issues.

She was not asked about her serious health issues.

She was not asked about pay for play with the corrupt CGI, cash grab initiative.

And she was not asked about the real father of her daughter, web Hubbell….

http://images.gawker.com/mpbsrp7z2rwim47iqziq/c_scale,fl_progressive,q_80,w_800.jpg

How do you feel about your candidate calling you a racist?

Do you agree with your candidates “claim” that the wealthy do not pay their fair share?

Is trickle down economics an accepted term in the field study of economics?

@Greg:

Simple Definition of debate:

: a discussion between people in which they express different opinions about something

Full Definition of debate:
: a contention by words or arguments: as
a : the formal discussion of a motion before a deliberative body according to the rules of parliamentary procedure
b : a regulated discussion of a proposition between two matched sides
Merriam-Webster Dictionary

The moderator is supposed to pose the questions and to monitor the time. The moderator is not involved on either side of the debate. It is up to the debaters to prove or disprove the comments, not the moderator. If the moderator does participate in the debate, then he is no longer a moderator but a debater. Don’t you ever get tired of being wrong?

@Randy:

Greg is not paid to be right, he is paid to disrupt and attempt to pass along propaganda designed to influence the most ill informed among us.

Except here, the is a level of informativeness that renders Greg continually wrong. Were he not being paid I hasten to make mention he would vamoose.