Pitiful performance, part 2
or: What the hell were they thinking??
posted 4-20-2008 - 5:15 pm

 
So I get home very late Wednesday night, well after midnight, and I turn on the TV to review what I've taped. Included in what's on the VCR is Wednesday night's debate between the presidential candidates, hosted by ABC. I've seen loads of debates before. Given that this one wasn't hosted by PBS, I wasn't expecting much but the usual tame stuff with maybe one or two legit 'gotchas' on accidentally pertinent subjects. After all, David Brinkley and Ted Koppel are gone, and I couldn't think of anyone at ABC who'd ask much in the way of incisive questions; but you never know. Perhaps one of their Washington-based correspondents would come up with a decent question or two.

Let's just say it right up front: egregiously bad. Terminally stupid questions. Unquestionably the worst debate since presidential debates were first televised. An embarrassment to journalists everywhere. I felt personally offended and insulted by the moderators' blithering inanity.

Now, I'm in the news business, so no matter how boring this turned out to be, I felt obligated to watch at least part of it. I expected to be underwhelmed. What I didn't expect was to be yelling at the TV at 1 in the morning because I'm flaming pissed off at the moderators. They were complete asses.

Imagine: 50 minutes went by without a single policy question; what else were we all there for if not to pose serious policy questions to the candidates and push for detailed answers?? The debate was front-loaded with trivia, and the whole program was larded with commercials anyway, leaving not much time for substance — not that substance was present. Even the remainder of the debate didn't cover much.

I was so furious that I could barely make it through the program (I *didn't* make it through more than 2 minutes before I started sniping back at the screen; it only took 10 before the yelling began). I got SO bloody angry that I was still pacing around the room a few hours later, unable to simmer down enough to go to sleep but too steamed to write. Irritated thoughts like 'Who approved those idiot questions?' or 'Why didn't they remove Stephanopoulos due to conflict of interest? Do they even *know* what conflict of interest means??' and vicious retorts kept running through my head.

By then, I was spitting fire, upset because the debate audience would conclude (almost fairly) that most journalists are self-aggrandizing, headline-grabbing incompetents, me included. My reputation has been blackened by association, and I'm not earning one-twentieth of the money Charlie Gibson makes. That pissed me off even more. Even if they fired Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos immediately, they'd probably get a nice severance package. Even their severance package would probably be more than I make in a year, and I'm a better journalist. The whole business gave me a headache.

A glass of wine and five hours of restless sleep later, I woke to discover that much of the rest of the audience had the same incendiary reaction that I did. Thank heavens; I'd figured the audience would be too bored or too clueless to react. I was glad to be wrong.

More than 17,000 messages within 24 hours had been left on ABC's web site alone, overwhelmingly negative, and more were pouring in. Checking my e-mail, I noted that MoveOn had already organized a protest petition directed at ABC (to be sure, they're supporting Obama, but he's not the only one who got short shrift during the debate). Naturally, I logged on to their site and signed the protest petition myself, adding just enough observations of my own to cause third-degree burns. Then I sent out a scathing e-mail of my own to about 20 people, lambasting ABC News and asking my friends and colleagues to sign, too. Within a day of announcing the petition, MoveOn had more than 250,000 signatures, and more were coming in.

The media caught on to the reaction story and played it up over the next two days, updating as needed. One of the earliest salvos came from Editor & Publisher, an industry publication for managers and owners in the news business. E&P called the debate "perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years." That pretty much set the tone for the majority of the other critics.

Even ABC News ran a piece that night on the evening news, but it was tame and didn’t really go into how negative the reaction was to the moderators’ questions and the overall lack of substantial policy discussion, which, for once, wasn’t the candidates’ fault. Well, we didn’t really expect them to dis their own homeboys, now did we, though that would have been a refreshing change.

The big question now is: did ABC News learn anything from this, or will it do just as badly the next time? Because I really rather doubt that those guys in the big corporate offices get it, or they and their counterparts at CBS and NBC wouldn’t be gutting their news departments like they are. Even CNN is an embarrassing parody of itself now, compared to the Ted Turner years. They had a great journalist like Judy Woodruff — for, what, about a decade? — and didn’t know what to do with her. Now she’s back at PBS on The News Hour and has a chance to do good work again.

The next primary — and, therefore, the next debate — will be in Oregon next month. There is one group pushing for substantial discussion by the candidates: the folks behind Science Debate 2008, who are overwhelmingly scientists, engineers, and those who have an interest in those subjects. In other words, smart people who think the nation’s decisionmakers ought to be guided in their decision by the best possible information rather than party politics or personal agendas. You should check out their web site: that’s a very long list of supporters they have, both individual and organizational. Their subject for the debate is: “Is America Losing its Competitive Edge? A Presidential Debate on the role of Science in America's Future.”

Science Debate 2008 has a commitment from the PBS programs Now and NOVA, along with public television stations KOPB in Portland, WGBH in Boston, and WNET in New York, to sponsor and broadcast the event nationally on a Friday in May. The moderator for the event will be David Brancaccio, the host of Now on PBS, with a panel of internationally recognized scientists selected by the organizers, Science Debate 2008. Science Debate 2008 itself has the backing of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Council on Competitiveness.

What the group doesn’t have is a commitment from any of the candidates, which ought to embarrass all three of them but somehow doesn’t. You’d think a discussion about our competitiveness as a nation would be of interest to them.

Viewers could get a worthwhile discussion like that, or they could end up with another ‘he said, she said’ but of nonsense from another of the network news departments. One thing’s for certain: after the ABC debacle, whoever is doing the next debate has been put on notice. Viewers and voters want more than the same old, same old, and they’re not shy about saying so. It remains to be seen whether or not the candidates are listening.