Ifill's BFF at NPR Lines Up Happy Talk After VP Debate

While it’s predictable that Gwen Ifill’s professional colleagues would form a defensive circle around Ifill’s credibility as moderator of the vice-presidential debate, it’s even more predictable that her closest personal friends would use their programs (on taxpayer-funded airwaves) to come to her defense. On her daily National Public Radio talk show Tell Me More on Friday, host Michel Martin disclosed her friendship with Ifill, and lined up two liberal professor guests to boost Ifill’s professionalism.

Alan Schroeder, a journalism prof at Northeastern University, and Joel Goldstein, a law prof at St. Louis University, took turns boosting Ifill’s credibility, with one saying a conflict-of-interest charge was "dirty pool," and the other calling the issue "fairly ridiculous." On her NPR show August 11, Martin dedicated more than four minutes of her show to a commentary attacking the Commission on Presidential Debates for picking three old white guys as moderators, and not Ifill, who she disclosed was "one of my closest friends."

Back then, Martin strangely compared the debate moderators to a jury pool for a courtroom – is Obama on trial? – and huffily concluded that young people, women and minorities – "you are all on probation, you all just have to wait your turn, whenever it is."

Here’s the cozy and helpful Gwen-toasting segment of the Friday show:

MARTIN: I do need to ask about the moderator Gwen Ifill, who in the spirit of full disclosure, is a personal friend of mine. There was a - I don't know if you would agree with this, a campaign of sorts I would say by conservative writers who said that a book she's writing about the post-civil rights politics, African-American politicians posed a conflict, how do you all think that she did? Do you think the questioning was fair? Professor Goldstein?

GOLDSTEIN: Yeah. I think she's a real professional, and she did the debate in 2004, she asked very sort of direct questions, I think. Doesn't really play gotcha at all. And my understanding is that the fact that she was writing this book was something that both campaigns have known for quite a long time. So I think it really was sort of dirty pool at the last minute to try and game her in the sense and to try to suggest that there was unfairness. I thought she's a professional and I thought she was last night.

MARTIN: Alan, what do you think? In fact I have to tell you that some of the comments on the message - the NPR message board suggest that people feel that she wasn't as aggressive as she could have been, because it was commented upon that Sarah Palin did not answer many of the questions that were directly posed to her. And of course she says she wasn't going to but - what do you think?

SCHROEDER: Well, I think that Gwen Ifill was somewhat at the mercy of the format here. I mean, you had these 90-second responses followed by a whopping two minutes of discussion. There's not too much you can get done in that amount of time. And I guess I do -- I'm a big admirer of Gwen Ifill’s, and I think she's a terrific interviewer. I could sort of sense her frustration not being able to follow up. But I do would she had perhaps held their feet to a fire a little more closely in getting those answers. On the point of this complaint about her writing a book, I mean, I think that, that's fairly ridiculous because the campaigns themselves endorsed Gwen Ifill and approved her as the moderator. If there had been a problem, they had every opportunity to do something about it a month ago and there were no objections whatsoever.

If Martin was acting less like a personal friend and more like a journalist, she and NPR might have allowed some of their air time for an opposing conservative point of view. They did not. So much for professionalism at our taxpayer-funded public radio system.

[Photo from NPR.org]