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Immoderate thoughts about the Clinton-Obama debate

By Jim Chen

Watch it again. Read the transcript. It's impossible to miss what 10 million viewers noticed: ABC News' moderators, Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, along with the national news media as a whole, were the real losers of this week's debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:

[V]iewers of all political persuasions were affronted by the moderators? failure to ask about the mortgage crisis, health care, the environment, torture, education, China policy, the pending G.I. bill to aid veterans, or the war we?re losing in Afghanistan. Those minutes were devoted not just to recycling the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bosnian sniper fire and another lame question about a possible ?dream ticket? but to the unseemly number of intrusive commercials and network promos that prompted the jeering at the end. The trashiest ads often bumped directly into an ABC announcer?s periodic recitations of quotations from the Constitution. Such defacing of American values is to be expected, I guess, from a network whose debate moderators refuse to wear flag pins.

Kudos to Frank Rich of the New York Times for this succinct evaluation of the disastrous debate. For some comic relief, read Obsidian Wings' parody.

Full post as published by Jurisdynamics on April 20, 2008 (boomark / email).