I just finished watching the New Hampshire Democratic debate. It’s been a very long time since I watched a Presidential debate — probably 1996 was the last time, if even then. Memories turn golden very quickly, so I’m sure part of my red-faced outrage at how Charles Gibson and his toady Scott Spradling led the debate is due to my too-good-to-be-true memories of those debates in the past.
Nonetheless, from a member of the American press I would expect more. Prefacing each of his three sections with a piece of “journalism” about how, say, the surge had worked — presenting journalistic opinion as fact from which the debate should leap off — would turn the stomach of any old-school journalist. At one point, Mr. Gibson even said, “I’m not here to debate” and then tried to refute Richardson’s claims that the surge had not worked.
Whose job is it to call such behavior into question? ABC News’ editor-in-chief, I suppose, by preventing someone with such loose scruples from leading the debate in the first place. But in the thick of it, when someone is already out there abusing the rules of rhetoric and debate, who will call a Charles Gibson out? None of the candidates did. That would be too risky, I suppose.
But Gibson finally went too far, he was called out, and I see this incident as very instructive. The topic was recession, and Gibson had stepped into the debate again:
GIBSON: …When we are approaching recession, it is consumers who have spent us out of recession in most cases. You’re all talking about letting some of the Bush tax cuts lapse.
SEN. CLINTON: Yeah, but Charlie, the tax cuts on the wealthiest of Americans, not the middle-class tax cuts. One of the problems with George Bush’s tax policy has been the way he has tilted it toward the wealthy and the well-connected.
GIBSON: If you take a family of — if you take a family of two professors here at Saint Anselm, they’re going to be in the $200,000 category that you’re talking about lifting the taxes on. And — (laughter).
EDWARDS: I don’t think they agree with you.
SEN. OBAMA: I’m not sure that that’s — (laughter) –
SEN. CLINTON: That may be NYU, Charlie.
It was the audience who called Gibson out, the real people who were the topic of the debate. That made me happy for the first and only time during the debate. We can stand up for ourselves even when our politicians can’t!
leesajay | 23-Jan-08 at 10:38 am | Permalink
i can’t speak to your golden memories, but i definitely think this kind of thing is indicative of the declining state of journalism today. what cheeses me off the most is the way that election coverage has become so totally about campaign strategy at the expense of information about, say, what policies the candidates actually support.
i agree that we, the audience/electorate, can stand up for ourselves–and that means being vigilant about holding news orgs accountable.