מקור: Columbia Journalism Review
“Horrific.” “A total mess.” “An embarrassment.” “A national humiliation.""An epic moment of national shame.” “מחוץ למסילה.” “A pure trainwreck.” “A hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a trainwreck.” “A stressful, chaotic trash fire.” “A shitshow"."הגדול American shitshow.” “A low point in American political discourse.” “A disgusting night for democracy.” “It was not a presidential debate. It was mud-wrestling.” “It wasn’t even a debate. It was a disgrace.” “I can’t go to you, Chuck, with my normal, Give me some political analysis question, because I think we need to just pause for a moment and say, That was crazy. מה היה that?” “I basically am paid to watch it and it was a struggle for me to get through ninety minutes of it. That was some tough television. Whew.” “As somebody who has watched presidential debates for forty years, as somebody who has moderated presidential debates, as someone who has prepared candidates for presidential debates, as someone who’s covered presidential debates, that was the worst presidential debate I have ever seen in my life.” “Perhaps we could also debate by mail.”
As legions of pundits concluded in the aftermath, the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, in Cleveland, was, indeed, dreadful—though it feels unfair to drag Biden, the city of Cleveland, and the word “debate” into that analysis. More or less every fear that I had going in was realized: the moderator, Chris Wallace, was desperately inadequate; Trump’s lies about election integrity weren’t sufficiently challenged; the segment on “race and violence in our cities” missed the point, and played into Trump’s hands. (“Surprise!” BuzzFeed’s Ryan Brooks wrote, “the ‘race and violence in our cities’ section of the debate was really racist!”) One moment was particularly dark: Trump failed to condemn white supremacy, then namechecked the Proud Boys, a violent far-right group, and told its members to “stand back and stand by.” (Proud Boys everywhere were thrilled.) That aside, it’s not worth dwelling on what was said, since much of it defied coherent characterization and analysis. “How do you even write about what just happened?” Kyle Pope, CJR’s editor and publisher, שאל בטוויטר. “You have to Hunter S. Thompson it, riffing on the absurdity and the chaos and the gloom.” (Maria Bustillos, who also writes for CJR, suggested writing privately for posterity, like a latter-day Suetonius.)
Much punditry cast the debate not only as awful, but as an aberration from a fine democratic tradition—an echo of the way many pundits see Trump generally. That’s mistaken. Just as Trump is, in many ways, a symptom of wider systemic flaws (see the tax system for the most recent example), last night felt like the logical endpoint of America’s recent history of debates, and the way we talk about them. If you insist on grading a serious process as shallow entertainment, it should be no surprise when a shallow entertainer turns up and exploits it. Yesterday, a finding from a Monmouth University poll—that seventy-four percent of Americans were planning on watching the first debate, even though just three percent thought it “very likely” to sway their vote—circulated widely, as evidence of entrenched polarization. That’s fair, but a different assessment of that figure—that “the audience for these debates are voters who already have a rooting interest in one side or the other”—was perhaps more pertinent. This is the reason you watch a sporting event. And that is what many Americans have come to expect of debates.
In the aftermath, some מבקרי התקשורת stressed that the format needs to change ahead of the next debate, כולל על ידי empowering the moderator to cut off candidates’ mics when necessary; רב כותבי טור
In many ways, the things reporters and pundits said before yesterday’s debate are as illuminating as the things they said afterwards, and perhaps more so. As I wrote yesterday, the buildup was marked by a parade of values-free, fight-night-style triviality, including many takes that implicitly lauded the effectiveness of Trump’s debate “style.” (Some of these felt like hindsight-heavy רוויזיוניזם, but that’s beside the point.) Such analysis continued right up until debate time. Some of the last remarks I heard before the networks handed to Wallace said, of Trump: “He is a performer, and of course, we’ll have to see how he performs tonight”; “He wants to shake things up, that’s always been his way”; “He’s been here before, four years ago, and he turned it around, in part, with a debate, and going relentlessly and ruthlessly on the attack.” Trump’s subsequent behavior was not some huge surprise—not enough of one to justify the whiplash change of tone, at any rate. Instead, we were performing a debate ritual: לעורר קרבות, לאחר מכן clutch pearls about the fights, then analyze how good the fights were. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Unlike some of those who would cancel the debates, or write them off as inevitably worthless, I believe that they יכול matter, and צריך be illuminating. That they so often aren’t is not just a product of weak moderation, or format flaws, or Trump—it reflects a media-wide failure of seriousness and imagination. Such failures don’t just manifest in the language pundits use to frame debate nights themselves; they manifest in wider attitudes that treat genuine policy debates—in the broadest sense of that word—as boring, unrealistic, infantile. In so many ways, 2020 is a natural jumping-off point for broad, society-wide debates that allow radical ideas—on reforming the economy, on fighting climate change, on racial injustice, and so on—a fair hearing. It’s the media’s job to moderate such debates, by featuring them prominently in our day-to-day coverage and chatter. Until we do that more consistently, debates—in the narrower sense of that word—will, like so much else in America, continue to be a shitshow.
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