OPINION:
It’s not clear just who’s running the Republican debates, but the outrage of Reince Priebus over last week’s gong-show moderators is understandable, and about time. The chairman of the Republican National Committee suspended the party’s “partnership” with NBC News for a debate next February, close to crucial Iowa caucuses.
He told Andrew Lack, the chairman of NBC News, that the debate last week conducted by CNBC, a corporate affiliate of NBC Universal News Group, was done “in bad faith.” The sole role of the Republican National Committee, he said, “is to ensure that our candidates are given a full and fair opportunity to lay out their vision for America’s future. We simply cannot continue with NBC without full consultation with our campaigns.”
The letter appeared to have quick results. A spokesman for the network called it “a disappointing development,” but said it would work “in good faith to resolve this matter with the Republican Party.” The shot across the bow, as shots across the bow often are, was heard loud and clear.
Having got the ear of the network, Mr. Priebus must tread carefully now. Though it will no doubt apply the needed pressure on “the talent” to behave themselves next time, the network cannot tell that talent what to say and how to say it. The natural instinct of any “talent,” whether actually talented or not, is to demonstrate that he or she is not under the thumb of the corporate suits. The corporate executives often do not understand this. Businessmen, often with little understanding of how things work in the world of words and ideas, prefer to deal businessman-to-businessman, thinking a word in the right ear will quiet an annoying tongue.
The MSNBC moderators who dealt last week in snark and insolence did so because that’s the nature of television news, where the emphasis has always been on sensation and graphics. Talk is cheap, thinking is not. That’s why television news is decorated with pretty faces — blond hair and high cheekbones are highly prized — and the game is invariably “follow the leader.”
The way to get better questions is to get better questioners. Mr. Priebus and his committee should insist that the networks recruit interrogators from the ranks of those who have a record of asking questions without resort to insult or vanity. These are most likely to be the men and women who cover the news for newspapers and magazines, who travel with the candidates, who work their craft in the realm of ideas and policy, without undue obsession with how they look or how their hair is styled. Donald Trump’s hair trumps all, anyway.
Television is about entertainment, and the MSNBC moderators were entertaining, unless you were one of the candidates. Their snark lifted the network from the ranks of the junior varsity, if only for a night, and they’re entitled to whatever they got for the night’s work.
Even these duels we call debates, with sound bites as the weapons of choice, can produce more than they produced last week. Some people watch the debates to get a line on the candidates, of who the next president might be. A modest bias is tolerable, if it’s balanced by bias across the table. What the public deserves is intelligence and smarts. Banish the entertainers. Bring back the reporters.
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