Pacific Views

What was wrong with the NH debate.

Campaign Desk's Zachary Roth nails the biggest problem with the Democratic candidate's 'debate' in New Hampshire last night: the journalists on the panel asked poor, and often just plain stupid, questions.

Time and again, the moderators constructed questions that focused on the candidates' past actions, and seemed designed only to generate a story for the next day's coverage. General Wesley Clark in particular never got a chance to do anything other than rebut a series of hostile attacks.

In order to tell viewers what they'd do as president, the candidates often had to ignore the question entirely -- which they did.

(We'd suggest that bad questions aimed at making headlines is a more general problem in how the US media covers politics, electoral or otherwise.)

Other explanations for the dullness of the debate are being floated, too. Another post by Roth suggests that the panelists talked too much. And at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall thinks that the ideological make-up of the panel probably had something to do with the low calibre of the debate. (Go to the fourth paragraph from the bottom of the post.)