Column: No More Liberal Moderators Tilting Debates

The bold decision made by the Republican National Committee was viewed as an outrage among media leaders. RNC resigned from the apparently bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates.  

This isn’t an absurdity. It’s long overdue. Fox News is not a good platform for primary debates. It’s only in the last two cycles, the Trump cycles, that they accepted a Fox News moderator in the fall – and that was Chris Wallace, who escaped to CNN.

Republicans must be strict about what constitutes fair debate. The RNC can follow the DNC’s lead and not have any debates about primary issues on Republican-hating channels or their Republican-bashing moderators. If individual candidates want to be interviewed and treated like an insensitive buffoon by Anderson Cooper, that’s their choice.

In the nine election cycles we’ve monitored at the Media Research Center, the moderators have been almost entirely fixtures in the so-called “mainstream media.” In all of these cycles except 2020, Republicans have been subjected to a so-called “town hall” debate, where the “town” is a Potemkin village of carefully scripted and chosen questioners who routinely tilt to the Left, just like the moderators.

The RNC should reject any stage-managed “town hall” fakery from any of the liberal networks. Republicans should not have to confront hecklers at the events they are running for office, but at fair and balanced debates.

CNN’s John Avlon gave the best freakout, hands down. With all the usual unsubtlety of CNN analysis, Avlon predicted the end of presidential debates, “at least for quite a while.” He called it “a blow to our democracy,” and a “temper tantrum thrown at Donald Trump’s request, complaining that the commission is biased.”

Decrying debates for being biased against Republicans is an obvious fact. It’s been baked in our political cake for at least 30 years. But Avlon really deserved the laugh track by adding the RNC’s decision is “a virtual guarantee that America will retreat further into its partisan echo chamber, which is the last thing we need.”

He said this on CNN, which is never more hilarious than when its pompous personalities lament “partisan echo chambers.”

Susan Page is a MSNBC anchor USA Today complained that we “run the risk of not having presidential debates, of not having the two candidates who are vying to lead our nation being forced to stand side by side and answer independent-minded questions.”

Earth to Page: Half of America laughs when the media call themselves “independent-minded,” especially as journalists relentlessly pressured each other since 2016 that the Trump-Pence ticket must not be “normalized.” Page’s questions weren’t “independent-minded” when she moderated the vice-presidential debate on October 7, 2020.

Page lectured Pence that America was a global leader in coronavirus deaths and scolded the president for holding a “super-spreader” event at the White House. Page lectured Pence about how the “landmark Roe v. Wade decision” was threatened by Amy Coney Barrett, but failed to ask Kamala Harris about liberal demands to pack the Supreme Court.  Page lectured Pence about how global warming threatens disaster, and then repeated Harris’s answer in a second question: “Senator Harris just said that climate change is an existential threat. Vice President Pence, do you believe that climate change poses an existential threat?”

If anybody should be accused of an “anti-democratic” tilt in the next election cycle, it should be the control freaks of the liberal media who can’t stand to be criticized and challenged. America’s Republican Party wants a better deal.