After issuing a statement late Monday night blasting Lester Holt’s job as presidential debate moderator, Media Research Center president Brent Bozell joined the Fox Business Network’s late-night coverage and urged Donald Trump to “raise hell” over Holt “pitch[ing] softballs to Hillary Clinton all night long.”
Host Neil Cavuto turned to Bozell around the 12:48 a.m. Eastern mark for his thoughts on Holt and Bozell promptly went to his “scorecard” on Holt’s relentless hardballs and follow-ups to Trump versus those to Clinton.
On birtherism, stop and frisk, and taxes, Bozell noted that Holt asked Trump about these issues but immediately “challenged him on his answer” and then “challenged, interrupted, or fact-checked him six different times” about whether Trump backed the invasion of Iraq.
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Seeing as how Holt chose not to ask “one single challenge to anything she said, not one tough question on anything she said, not one question on a controversy, be it Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation, the e-mails, her medical records,” Bozell ruled that Holt proved he “did the bidding” of his fellow journalists to “go after Donald Trump, and let up on Hillary.”
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Cavuto recalled the fury of criticism by the media when it came to the Matt Lauer-moderated town hall and lamented that “I just think, if you go after one, you go after the other.”
Bozell shot back that it’s astounding that Republicans continually emerage as “shocked” whenever liberal journalists act as themselves in debates:
At the end of the day, why are the Republicans choosing these people, it happens almost every day debate. They behave like Lester Holt behaved tonight and then they’re shocked. They’re absolutely shocked that a left-wing journalist behaved like a left-wing journalist. I mean, and by the way, look at Martha Raddatz coming up. The same things’s going to happen again. It happens every time, it is frustrating to watch this thing happen.
Before Cavuto moved onto other panelists for a good portion of the segment, Bozell slammed Holt for having “pitched softballs to Hillary Clinton all night long, asking her to explain her policy prescriptions, of her campaign” which was “[p]erfectly fine” but “just do the same thing, with Donald Trump or if you’re going to bring up taxes, bring up birther issue then bring up Benghazi, bring up the Clinton Foundation.”
Bozell received a chance to offer a concluding statement closer to 1:00 a.m. Eastern and offered some stern advice for Trump going forward:
I think that, if I were Donald Trump — if I were advising Donald Trump, don’t come out — don’t come out as a spoiled sport, but do make hay over this one. Do raise hell about this. If they can work the refs, so should he and I think he should start working the refs and he should start making an issue about this, how one-sided these debates are and it will work in his favor. At least, it might make them do a good job.
