For
a bunch of self-proclaimed American exceptionalists, there’s nothing
American or exceptional about the list of demands written by Ben Ginsberg,
the attorney acting as chief negotiator for GOP candidates irritated by
televised-debate conditions. In fact, they’re certifiably un-American.
“The
campaigns’ [sic] will use the manner in which your debate(s) are run
(and changes you say will you make from your past debates), the quality
and fairness of your moderators’ questions, their enforcement of the
rules, and their ability to achieve parity in distribution and quality
of questions and time among the candidates to evaluate whether
the candidates wish to participate in your future debates,” it reads. Apart from being comically convoluted, it’s a direct affront to US constitutional values.
The
document goes on to detail a number of questions and rules broadcasters
must satisfy in order to secure the participation of Republican
candidates. They range from the harmless: “Where and when will the
debate take place?”; to the paranoid: “[Do not] use behind shots of
candidates showing their notes ... Who is the moderator? Will there be
any additional questioners? Are they seated?”; to the downright
censorial: “Will you commit that you will not ... allow
candidate-to-candidate questioning ... have reaction shots of members of
the audience or moderators during debates?”
It’s
a ridiculous and embarrassing document, to be sure—but also more than a
little alarming. It surely indicates a deep, ingrained rot plaguing the
Republican party; a political outfit that has become so
image-conscious, so infested with paranoid narcissists that it is
willing to tear the first page off the Constitution.
A
country that proclaims itself as the global example for the protection
of free speech cannot seriously entertain this kind of behavior. If the
media allows candidates to essentially dictate the content of the
debates by agreeing to their draconian restrictions on format,
could Americans still claim to have a fairer politics then those that
elected Silvio Berlusconi in Italy or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey?
Surely,
something major has shifted in the nature of mainstream political
coverage over the past few decades to allow for this. Undeniably, it is
the advent the internet and social media.
Thanks
to Twitter, Facebook, and targeted email lists, candidates have made
significant inroads on the turf that used to belong to mainstream media
outlets. Candidates no longer rely solely on air time to disseminate
their messages. When they aren’t feeling sufficiently heard, they can go
around CNN, Fox, and the various NBCs, as Donald Trump’s colorful
tweets have most notably demonstrated.
And as was clear from the most recent Republican debate,
broadcast by CNBC on Oct. 30, the candidates are unafraid to stand up
to the media, creating yet another layer of public spectacle. The
relationship between major media and all political candidates in the
United States has historically been an adversarial one—but the animosity
was veiled. There was, to an extent, reciprocal if reluctant respect.
The new ability for Trump, Ben Carson, and company to reach hundreds of
thousands, even millions of supporters and prospective supporters by way
of Twitter and Facebook, independent of any third-party editorial
guidelines, means they need not be first and foremost deferential to
journalists. They can be outright derisive, and at the same time, cash
in on (generally conservative) frustrations with the “lamestream media”
and “gotcha journalism.”
All
of this means the cooperative side of interaction between candidates
and the press may be dying. It may even be already dead. If televised
debates devolve into scripted pageantry, perhaps it would be best to do
away with them all together. But that would be the equivalent of an
armistice. More likely, the war will grow hotter, and the media will
ramp up its “gotcha” coverage, even if most of it takes place outside of
the debates themselves, if only to meet force with force.
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