The dumbing down of the media.

The spotlight is on ABC on their shameful Democratic debate last night. I lost alot of respect for Charlie Gibson. Big shoes to fit as the replacement for the late Peter Jennings. All I can say from these comments are ditto, ditto, ditto...

From The Anonymous Liberal:

Wow

For reasons I can't fully explain, I sat through the entire two hours of ABC's "debate" tonight, and it was--hands down--the worst mainstream media performance I've ever seen. Gibson and Stephanopolous made Chris Matthews look like a consummate professional. That's how bad it was.

It was virtually substance free. Rather than asking policy questions, the moderators spent the vast majority of the time trying to embarrass the candidates (mostly Obama) by quoting things said by people who are loosely associated with them. It was an orgy of banality and triviality that made everyone who watched it dumber.

On the few occasions where the discussion did turn to policy, the moderators asked deeply loaded questions that the candidates had no hope of being able to unpack and debunk in the 90 seconds they were given. Gibson's questions about the capital gains tax were the perfect example of this. He simply asserted that capital gains cuts lead to increased revenue (i.e., they cause the government to bring in more money than it otherwise would). Needless to say, this is a highly dubious empirical assertion, but the way that Gibson asked the question left no room for it to even be challenged. The candidates were forced to accept its truth as a given and try to answer the question accordingly.

UPDATE: Glad to see my assessment is shared by others.

Also,

Will Bunch:

It’s hard to know where to begin with this, less than an hour after you signed off from your Democratic presidential debate here in my hometown of Philadelphia, a televised train wreck that my friend and colleague Greg Mitchell has already called, quite accurately, “a shameful night for the U.S. media.” It’s hard because — like many other Americans — I am still angry at what I just witnesses, so angry that it’s hard to even type accurately because my hands are shaking. Look, I know that “media criticism” — especially when it’s one journalist speaking to another — tends to be a genteel, colleagial thing, but there’s no genteel way to say this.

With your performance tonight — your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane “issue” questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters — you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it’s even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to “export democracy,” and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, “no thank you.” Because that was no way to promote democracy.


If I were in any way associated with ABC News, I would be deeply, deeply embarrassed about that debate. It epitomized everything that is wrong with mainstream political coverage in this country.

And can we now put to rest the annoying SNL-inspired meme that somehow the press is coddling Obama in these debates? ABC spent the first half hour of that debate (on national television!) trotting out every single tired line of attack against Obama (he's an unpatriotic flag hater; his minister is a crazy racist; he thinks small town people are rubes, etc.). Yes, there was eventually a mention of Hillary's Bosnia remarks (at which point Obama graciously defended her), but there was an obvious imbalance.

The entire thing was a debacle from start to finish, a case study in everything that is wrong with political coverage in this country.