Ted Cruz tweeted today the answer to all our debate woes and its actually a pretty good idea:
1/x Everyone agrees Tuesday’s debate was a train wreck. A major contributing fact was the moderator Chris Wallace, a registered Democrat, repeatedly interrupting to try to help Joe Biden. The next debate is set to be moderated by a former intern to…Joe Biden. (And Ted Kennedy.)
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) October 1, 2020
2/x This is NUTS. And no Republican should allow this bias to continue in future elections.
I propose 2 simple, fair rules for future debates:
(1) GOP primary debates should be moderated by people who actually vote in a GOP primary. (Not Dem journalists who want GOP to lose.)
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) October 1, 2020
3/x And (2) General election debates should be moderated by an equal number of GOP and Dems.
We should stop pretending obvious bias doesn’t exist. Instead, equalize & counter-balance it.
A debate moderated by, say Mark Levin & Chris Hayes would be better than fake impartiality.
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) October 1, 2020
4/x Or Rush Limbaugh & Rachel Maddow.
Or Ben Shapiro & Chris Cuomo.
Both sides would take incoming & the debates would be real and substantive.
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) October 1, 2020
I like it a lot and it seems fair, which is why I know it’ll never happen. But even if it did I could still see problems, at least in the GOP primary debates because we still have divisions within the GOP. We’d need to have a moderate and conservative moderator to ‘solve’ that one too. But overall I think it’s a great idea.
In the first tweet Trump mentioned that the moderator of the 2nd debate is a former Biden intern and staffer to Teddy Kennedy. Here’s more on that from Daily Wire:
The second presidential debate, scheduled for October 15, will be moderated by Steve Scully, the political editor at C-SPAN and host of Washington Journal, who once worked as an intern for Senator Joe Biden in college, later working as a staff assistant in Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s communication office.
“While attending college, he served as an intern in the office of Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden, and later a staff assistant in Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s media affairs office,” Utah Valley University noted.
In an interview with Journalism Jobs in May 2011, when he was asked, “Has the quality of broadcast journalism decreased over the past five years?”, Scully took the opportunity to rip Fox News, stating, “I think what has gone downhill is when cable networks get caught in all the titillating news of the day when they should be focusing more on the things that are important to people, like following the money and the state of the nation. Having said that, if you’re sick and tired of watching Laci Peterson on the Fox News Channel, then you can come on to C-SPAN and understand the process that we do in following it.”
I’m not convinced that Skully will do a poor job because he has an ‘impartial’ C-SPAN reputation to uphold. But I am concerned about him, especially after C-SPAN changed the phone lines on the last day of the RNC from Republican and Democrat to Biden and Trump supporter. They did this, we assume, because they were getting so many Democrats calling in saying they were switching to vote for Republicans.