The New York Times’ live online coverage of the first Trump-Clinton presidential debate was anchored by the usual team of Nick Confessore, Maggie Haberman, Alan Rappeport, and Adam Nagourney on Monday night, with Haberman providing her usual defense of Hillary Clinton against charges of “sexism,” and Nick Confessore praising her as a “wonk’s wonk” with the misfortune of running in a year of “sheer anger.” Meanwhile, Michael Grynbaum somehow saw Trump-attacking Lester Holt as “the minimalist moderator."
(To save space, the interspersed live commentary from individual reporters has been strung together into single paragraphs.)
This was Confessore’s opening gambit before the debate: “What about Clinton? A wonk’s wonk who knows her stuff, who has actual binders full of proposals on everything from mental illness to substance abuse to taxes....But in a year when ideas have seemed less important than sheer anger, Clinton has sometimes had trouble getting voters to focus on those proposals....Tonight Clinton will face a difficult challenge: to push back against a candidate who swarms rivals with a blizzard of provocation and untruth, while maintaining the level aura of a commander in chief.”
Haberman kicked off with the sexism angle, as if there’s some voter who doesn’t yet know that Hillary Clinton is a woman: “This is the first time that a woman will be on the debate stage in a general election in this country. It will be something new for the 100 million people who were not active in the primaries....I think we are going to find there’s a latent level of sexism at play -- not in this debate per se, but in the election in general....It’s not clear how deep or how pervasive, but it is there.”
She continued to agitate for Clinton before the debate started: “The most recent moment when these two were on the same stage in some way was during the NBC national security forum a few weeks ago, for which Matt Lauer got enormous blowback....The focus was on how easy Lauer went on Trump, compared with his grilling of Clinton.”
During the debate itself, Haberman turned on Trump: “It sounds to me like he is screaming at her. I don’t think that is going to play well with moderate suburban voters.” Then Haberman prodded Hillary: “I am a little surprised at the degree to which Clinton isn’t pushing back harder when he is getting things wrong.” Over an hour into the debate, she finally injected some mild criticism: “When Clinton makes reference to the fact-checkers, it is a bit too much ref-working.”
Confessore thought Trump got the better of Clinton on trade, but overall: “I am wrestling with a sense that a season of watching Trump go nuts and do O.K. has left it hard for me to judge how this night went for him....But I am pretty sure it went badly.”
Meanwhile, Michael Grynbaum had a mixed review of NBC’s Lester Holt as “the minimalist moderator” (!) in “Holt of NBC Opted for Showing Restraint, Not Driving the Candidates’ Discussion.” (MRC President Brent Bozell would strongly object to that characterization.)
Call him the minimalist moderator.
Facing “knees buckling” scrutiny -- his words -- ahead of Monday evening’s presidential debate, Lester Holt of NBC, with the nation’s eyes (and the internet’s critics) upon him, opted to lie low.
He was silent for minutes at a time, allowing Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump to joust and bicker between themselves -- and sometimes talk right over him -- prompting some viewers to wonder if Mr. Holt had left the building.
But his reticence as moderator also gave viewers an unfiltered glimpse of the candidates: their views, speaking styles, and reactions under pressure. And Mr. Holt, amid a news media tempest over how aggressively a moderator should fact check candidates, took pains to reject Mr. Trump’s oft-repeated claim that he had initially opposed the Iraq war, telling the Republican nominee, “The record shows otherwise.”
Being less conspicuous often means attracting less criticism, and Mr. Holt’s conservative approach seemed designed to avoid the opprobrium that befell his NBC colleague, Matt Lauer, whose performance at a forum this month was widely panned after he repeatedly interrupted Mrs. Clinton and failed to challenge Mr. Trump.
....
Other pundits who had castigated Mr. Lauer seemed pleased with Mr. Holt’s performance. “Totally unobtrusive, but called out B.S. when it mattered,” wrote Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University. Mr. Trump, speaking after the debate, said “Lester did a great job” -- even as his Twitter account posted a complaint that questions about the Clinton Foundation and Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the Benghazi attack did not arise during the encounter.
Early Tuesday, some conservative groups criticized Mr. Holt, suggesting he posed tougher questions to Mr. Trump than Mrs. Clinton.
Later, Mr. Holt became more assertive. He asked Mrs. Clinton about her use of a private email server...
Actually, Holt can hardly take credit for that -- he didn’t query Clinton about her emails until Trump brought them up, and then did so almost apologetically. The Clinton Foundation was left totally unaddressed, as NewsBusters pointed out.
