Don’t Blame CNN
[I didn’t want to write this article. An author, who shall remain nameless, posted an article complaining about CNN’s Presidential debate format and its moderators’ failure to fact-check the debaters. I responded to that article, word-for-word (but with some typos fixed), as follows:]
I respectfully dissent. Trump’s behavior was predictable. What we saw is what he has always been. But the format revealed how diminished Joe Biden had become. That is valuable information. To me as a Never-Trumper, it was very bad news, but if the point of the session was to let us see the candidates, we cannot complain that we saw the candidates.
The format provided ample time for the participants to attack. Trump’s attacks were bogus, and Biden’s were inarticulate. But the time to do them was there. The problem was Biden. HE wasn’t there. It takes less than a minute to say “He didn’t answer the question, so there’s nothing to rebut. He never answers the question, because he has no answers. He just fills the dead air with lies. I know it, you know it, we all know it. Ask me a question, and I’ll give you an answer.”
Calling Trump a liar was Biden’s job, not the moderators’. I’ve heard complaints that the moderators committed “journalistic malpractice,” but they were not there as journalists. They were there as…