2012 GOP Candidates Need to Lay Down the Law on Debates
Posted in Elections by Julie Ponzi
When it comes to the debates, blogger and columnist,
Matt Lewis, reminds Republican candidates seeking the 2012 nomination for President of this axiom: "The people asking questions are usually more powerful than the people answering them."
GOP candidates need to remember this, he argues, when agreeing to the terms of any and all debates. The time is long past when Republicans need sit back and accept that the trade-off for necessary media exposure requires them to take the left-leaning proclivities of mainstream journalists as the given and only reality. The media world is a much bigger place these days and the people watching these debates have a right to expect something better and more challenging than a peppering of questions from the likes of Tom Brokaw. The debates should feature the best of both sides, of course. But featuring the best of the right side of the debate is long, long overdue. If the candidates can agree about nothing else when it comes to the terms of debate, they should--at least--be united and strong in the demand that we end the charade of mainstream media objectivity.
Read the whole post from Matt Lewis. It's 100% dead on.
H/T Jim Geraghty's
Morning Jolt
12:20 PM / November 12, 2010
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I suppose that is true, but the premise isn't as clear cut as that.
I think most americans find the main stream media to be slightly biased left, but an even greater number find
Fox News to be horribly skewed right.
I think Obama's criticisms would instantly start to sound if the advice of Matt Lewis was followed.
By all means you can do it for the republican primaries...yet even here you are opening yourself up to neo-con vs. paleo-con vs. tea party vs. social conservative type battles and making it explicit especially if you do Weekly standard and say Heritage, NRO.
You try to pick winners by giving one guy the hot bench treatement and lobbing softballs to the other, and folks will get that impression of bias ingrained.
It just isn't as true that the one who asks questions is more powerfull than the one who answers them.
I mean before Fox News it was a much easier sell to think of the mainstream media as liberal.
Now you got to realize that Obama is spending quite a bit of capital selling the liberal version of media bias. In addition the internet and alternative media...
Basically it is too much of a meme to take the first derivative.
That is the problem if it is 100% dead on, its too obvious.
Instead of fishing for sofballs, go find some hostile audiences. If you face a hostile audience you can always sell the mistakes as a result of questioneer bias.
That is would you rather listen to Mitt Romney at Ashbrook or Mitt Romney hooked up to a lie detector being grilled by Jesse Ventura on FEMA death camps?
What's really needed is a neutral broker to organize these debates...kind of like "the league of women voters" used to do (although I'm not claiming they were neutral). Surely in a country the size of America we can find at least one sizable organization neutral enough and political enough to organize debates, particularly if networks donate the air time.