In the wake of the furor over his gifts to the Clinton Foundation, George Stephanopoulos has taken himself out of the running to moderate a Republican presidential debate set to air on ABC next February. That development gave Salon’s Jim Newell a peg for his Friday argument that GOPers are off-base in their recent push for conservatives (or at least non-liberals) to moderate their party’s debates.
“The mainstream media moderator serves a useful function in Republican presidential debates,” wrote Newell. “If [he or she] asks a difficult or uncomfortable question, the Republican candidate can simply badger the moderator for pursuing a stealth liberal agenda. Whenever the candidate is on the verge of embarrassing him or herself, he or she can lash out at the moderator for trying to embarrass the cause of conservatism as a whole. All of the Republican voters in the audience are conditioned to hoot and holler with approval whenever this happens.”
Newell added that if the moderator is a bona fide righty, however, “it eliminates [the candidates’] escape hatch. It’s much harder to yell at a Fox News host or a Hugh Hewitt about how they’re protecting Democrats.”
From Newell’s piece (bolding added):
[I]t’s fascinating that donations to the Clinton Foundation are now considered controversial in and of themselves. Most rich people, Republican or Democrat, have made charitable donations to the Clinton Foundation, and not all of these donations qualify as de facto campaign contributions.
But anyway, they got rid of George Stephanopoulos. A nice, clean hit. There’s one “librul media reporter,” — in conservative parlance, this means any member of the mainstream media — who won’t get to sabotage the Republican party ahead of the 2016 election.
Is that really a good thing for the individual debaters themselves?
The mainstream media moderator serves a useful function in Republican presidential debates for the candidates. It offers them a pivot point, or a means of getting out of a corner. If a mainstream media moderator asks a difficult or uncomfortable question, the Republican candidate can simply badger the moderator for pursuing a stealth liberal agenda. Whenever the candidate is on the verge of embarrassing him or herself, he or she can lash out at the moderator for trying to embarrass the cause of conservatism as a whole. All of the Republican voters in the audience are conditioned to hoot and holler with approval whenever this happens.
It’s not enough to say that Newt Gingrich wielded this tactic from time to time during his 2012 presidential campaign. It’s more that he made yelling at mainstream media figures the centerpiece of his campaign. If you find yourself constantly lashing out at the mainstream media’s bias against you, that’s a good indication you’re carrying around reams and reams of baggage for which you have no legitimate answer. But it doesn’t matter.
The most famous example of this was his interaction with CNN’s John King. John King is the second most ideologically vacant vehicle within the mainstream media, behind his colleague Wolf Blitzer. Interacting with him is akin to interacting with a piece of wood. If he is somehow motivated by a desire to destroy the Republican Party’s electoral chances, he does an impossibly good job hiding it...
The GOP is culling the field of potential debate moderators this cycle, in addition to cutting the overall number of debates. Fox News will co-sponsor several debates, and conservatives like talk-radio host Hugh Hewitt will serve as moderators. This might seem like good news to the candidates at first. The liberal saboteurs will be vanquished! But it eliminates their escape hatch. It’s much harder to yell at a Fox News host or a Hugh Hewitt about how they’re protecting Democrats. Just look at Jeb Bush’s nightmare this week: it all kicked off with a question from Fox News’ Megyn Kelly. He couldn’t exactly call her question idiotic, or a favor to the Democrats.
They’re going to miss George Stephanopoulos. He’s too easy!
