The debate format is an embarrassment

[bluewater]

The debate format is an embarrassment. Here’s how to make it better.
By Margaret Sullivan

About 40 minutes after the start of Tuesday night’s Democratic debate, I got an email from a Washington Post reader with this subject line: “I don’t care for this.” He was complaining, of course, about the Detroit debate on CNN, which he described as a reality TV show with journalists playing celebrity hosts.

With frustratingly tiny and rigidly enforced response time, outsize attention to fringe candidates and divisive questions — some of which could have been framed by the Republican National Committee — the first Detroit debate was a lost opportunity to inform the voting public.

“Honestly, you could catalog all journalism’s faults just from watching debate moderators,” tweeted Joshua Benton, who runs Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab.

To wit: “An obsession with conflict over explanation, forcing complex policies into soundbites, above-it-all savviness that only makes sense if you spend all your time on Politics Twitter or in DC.”

The worst of Night 1 may have been the format itself, which started with a painfully high-octane video that managed to simultaneously evoke “The NFL Today,” World Wrestling Entertainment, and “Jeopardy!” Then there was the spaceship-like set that (according to CNN’s Oliver Darcy) took 100 people eight days to build and involved nine 53-foot semi-trucks.

In one way, CNN’s efforts were an improvement from NBC’s first round of debates a couple of weeks ago — at least there was no absurd demand for a show of hands on complex policy proposals.

But there was a major flaw: CNN’s moderators, like the strictest of schoolmasters, allowed almost no actual debating as they enforced the time limitations. That ridiculous rule needs immediate reform.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-debate-format-is-an-embarrassment-heres-how-to-make-it-better/2019/07/31/3b1b24ba-b38b-11e9-8f6c-7828e68cb15f_story.html?utm_term=.f3da51ba4192

[HerbChestnut]

1. I can understand why the moderators were so strict about time.

During a debate, candidates will speak until someone cuts them off because more speaking time = more exposure = more support (usually, unless you're Delaney). Without strict time enforcement, candidates will ramble for as long as they can get away with it before the moderators finally step in or other candidates try to interrupt them. The problems with the last two debates really stem from how many candidates are on the stage. People probably wouldn't notice strict time limits if there were only 4 or 5 candidates on stage and they had two or three minutes to make their point instead of one minute or less. With 10 candidates on stage, time limits need to be kept short in order to make sure everyone gets speaking time.

[Perseus]

3. You are correct, can't wait until the numbers drop

I am hoping this happens soon, there were three in the lineup who I will not miss, one of them is Delaney.

[thesquanderer]

4. You can still let someone finish their thought before cutting them off.

Jake Tapper probably wasted more time trying to get them to stop than if he had just waited to cut them off until they had at least finished their sentence, and the public would have been better informed for it.

[pnwmom]

6. You can be strict about time without having such short time limits.

Last edited Wed Jul 31, 2019, 05:23 PM - Edit history (1)

It felt like they were trying to cram as many questions as possible into the format. I would have preferred fewer questions developed at greater length.

[HerbChestnut]

8. The short time has everything to do with the number of candidates on stage.

There's too many.

[pnwmom]

10. Yeah, there's too many. But they could have asked half as many questions. n/t

Last edited Wed Jul 31, 2019, 07:12 PM - Edit history (1)

[Perseus]

2. Also, on the 1st debate we had the unpleasantness of Chuck Todd, yesterday it was Jake Tapper

What an ass Jake Tapper made of himself. Chuck Todd??? well, he makes an ass of himself every time he opens his mouth.

[doc03]

5. I thought the entire debate was an embarrassment. We aren't going to win in the rust belt

promising to offer free everything to everyone. This morning what I heard was the Democrats will raise our taxes through the roof. That is not me saying that it is former Democrats that we lost with the destruction and abandonment of unions.

[elocs]

7. Imagine a high school or college debate competition with 10 teams on the stage at once.

It's a joke with so many candidates with next to a zero chance of winning but their egos are so inflated that they believe they are the only ones who can do the job.

[Hortensis]

9. Worse than an embarrassment, a RW hit job. We KNOW CNN's

consistently biased themes helped elect Trump and Republicans and defeat Democrats in 2018, so that should be no surprise. One article described "conflict-starved moderators," but I believe Slate's Ashley Feinberg's overall takeaway is exactly on point:

CNN’s Debate Questions Were for Losers: Highlights of an all-night attack ad.

... And so the moderators peppered the candidates with questions that were evidently designed to produce bad answers in the short format. Question after question was framed up from the ideological perspective of a Heritage Foundation intern or otherwise crafted as a gotcha to generate a 15-second clip for Republican attack ads down the line.

On the one hand, it was a gross display of cynical political theater that wasted everyone’s time. On the other, congratulations to CNN’s Chris Cillizza on what was undoubtedly a phenomenal night of stunted politics-like content. Here, straight from the screen, are the questions CNN decided America needed to hear.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/07/cnns-democratic-debate-questions-were-embarrassing.html

The questions blazed along CNN's chyron all alone illuminate a big picture, and this link shows many of them as they appeared on the screen one after another. Our candidates had 30 to 60 seconds to answer these trolling-for-attack-as-defense questions, with many attempts to include earnest answers cut off after 30 seconds.

CNN deliberately designed out any chance of genuinely substantive debate. Never forgetting 2016 for a moment, we should fully expect that that's what CNN's upper management/owners intended. I'm thinking we should be glad that some candidates were able to produce answers to be proud of under these conditions anyway.