DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. (photo: Lynne Sladky/AP)
Who Is Slanting Our Presidential Debates?
07 February 16
iving candidates for President of the United States, including the seated president when seeking re-election, one minute or a minute and a half to answer questions from reporters on national TV is not a debate.
Standing up in a row a political party’s candidates for President for a reporter to single out any one of them to answer any question that reporter selects and words is not a debate.
A reporter or his or her network or newspaper deciding who among a party’s, say, three candidates for President goes onstage on national TV alone first, second, and last is not a debate.
A news organization or a political party deciding which confirmed candidates for President can or cannot take part in an official “debate” on the people’s publicly-owned airways is an unconstitutional misuse of our publicly-owned airways.
Having Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Democratic Party bureaucracy she presides over prohibiting the party’s candidates for President from taking part in any debates the party does not “sanction,” on announced penalty of barring them from all of its “sanctioned” debates on our public airwaves, is anti-democratic to the core.
So was Wasserman Schultz when she enacted her personal partisanship for the forerunner Hillary Clinton by limiting the Democratic debates this go-round to a scandalously few and scheduling them when the fewest people watch national TV.
CNN’s chosen interrogator, Chris Cuomo, cross-examining only Bernie Sanders with opinionated and sharply hostile questions the other night on a forum supposed to focus on citizens’ CNN-selected questions of the three Democratic candidates was a put-up job stacked for Hillary Clinton on the national airwaves the people own.
What’s going on here?
Formal debates among the confirmed candidates for President of the United States on our national airways should occur only on subjects and questions and in formats which the confirmed candidates have in advance selected, agreed on, and thereby control. Then, with a mutually selected chairperson, the candidates themselves should conduct their own debates. In my opinion, such and only such real, fair, and serious confrontations can and should be the formal debates for President on the publicly-owned airways in our people’s democracy.
Who gave just two of the political parties and the TV networks, including clearly partisan Fox and MSNBC and their selected reporters, literal control of the official national TV debates for President?
This was set up across the last 65 years, behind the scenes, by the two big parties making deals with the networks, one guesses also with the consent of the few leading candidates at different stages. The candidates, the networks, and their ego-birds had evolved these deals secretly since the Eisenhower-Stevenson election of 1952. The continuing mess excludes confirmed third-party and independent candidates and humiliates and insults those who are permitted to participate. Before our eyes and in our ears every four years now, this amounts to the networks’ and the two parties’ unconstitutional seizure and misuse of our public property to define and to slant the decisive dramas in our Presidential elections. Collectively, both the big-party candidates and the Congress standing silent all these decades should be ashamed of themselves.
What should be happening? How can such a huge quadrennial set of occasions be democratically managed? These are tough questions that should not be still new among us. I’ll try a start on it, but this is not the politicians’ business, this is everybody’s.
The confirmed candidates for President, and only they, should confer and make their arrangements among themselves for the debates on national TV far in advance, to winnow the field down for the autumn election to perhaps two, three, or four final candidates.
Proper debates among those very citizens who are asking us to make one of them the most powerful person on earth should occur only on propositions and subjects selected and worded and in formats agreed on among those actual candidates. Others – parties, persons, and organizations – of course can and should have open input, but the deciders should be only those confirmed candidates who are asking us to vote, into their personal hands, brains, emotions, and values, that much power over the American people, the human race, and the earth.
You have a better idea? Good.
The questions to be decided? Well, which candidates become the confirmed, legitimate candidates, how, and on what basis? How should a profusion of legitimate candidates (17 at first on the GOP side this year, wasn’t it?) be sorted out for manageably-sized tournament-shaped debates focusing into the autumn? Who will preside over each debate? What are to be the orders of the speakers, the propositions to be debated, and how much time will each one have for her or his primary speech and then refutation? By what if any trusted polls – before how-chosen audiences at the end voting their opinions, by walking or count or show of hands – by what electronic voting arrangements among U.S. citizens watching by TV, and by what rules and umpires, shall the field of candidates be narrowed down for the people’s deciding election?
Whenever they want to, people, newspapers, universities, organizations, can stage speeches and debates among the candidates of their choice who agree to participate. That’s fine. But none of them can use their broadcast licenses or insider status to misuse the airways that all the people own! Congress should call nationwide hearings and heave to. No one but first, Congress (who, remember? allegedly represent the people), and then, the confirmed candidates themselves, can legitimately design, conduct, and thus control the official debates for President on the publicly-owned airways. The press playing “gotcha” and the two dominant parties cutting out the rest of us are not legitimately and never should have become our presidential debates.
Ronnie Dugger, author of biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan and a book about Hiroshima, was founding editor of the Texas Observer and has written many pieces for The New Yorker, The Nation, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Times, and other periodicals. At the University of Texas, he and his partners won two national college debate championships, and he then participated in debates at the Oxford Union. He received the George Polk Career Award in Journalism in 2011 and is now writing a book about nuclear war. Email: ronniedugger@gmail.com
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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