A Pathetic Round of ‘Gotcha’ Questioning

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/17/8346/

A Pathetic Round of ‘Gotcha’ Questioning
by Jerry Lanson


Let’s cut to the chase: I’ve never seen a worse-moderated presidential debate, a more biased moderator performance, a less intelligent series of questions.

For 45 minutes, the first half of last night’s Democratic presidential debate, ABC’s Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos (Bill Clinton’s old communications guy) double-teamed Barack Obama. Unrelentingly, they asked a succession of questions about this campaign’s not so golden oldies: the beaten-to-death bitter comment, Obama’s pastor, Obama’s relationship with a neighbor who 40 years ago was a radical activist, even the Illinois senator’s penchant for celebrating his patriotism in ways other than parading around in flag-lapel pins.

Someone might just as well have asked: “Senator, are you or were you ever a member of the Communist Party? A sympathizer, perhaps? Because the tenor of the questions at times seemed vaguely reminiscent of the ’50s, the early ’50s when Joseph McCarthy took his communist witch hunt from the State Department to Hollywood.

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Finally, when the script turned to actual policy in the second half, the two moderators sounded a lot more like employees of Fox News than of a neutral network. Would the candidates pledge to never raise taxes? Would they really withdraw troops from Iraq if their generals asked for more time? Would they bomb Iran to protect Israel?

John McCain couldn’t have asked for a friendlier script.

Granted. Reporters get paid to ask tough questions. No complaint there. But they should be tough questions of substance, not rehashed spam. Surely, if ABC’s producers had done some hard reporting, they could have found something fresh — inconsistencies of policy statements over the campaign’s long march, perhaps; contradictions between the candidate’s current stands and past votes; or subtle differences between them on issues that really matter to the American public. Relooping an already weary newsreel, trotting out the tired and really terribly limited fudges and guilt-by-association embarrassments of this campaign, make for neither good debates nor good journalism.

For years now, I’ve grimaced when I see polls showing the persistent downward slope of public trust in the American news media. This Wednesday night, I could hardly blame that public.