As we debate about presidential debates, we should recognize how destructive and one-sided the current system is.
We give far too much power to the news media, which is always anti-conservative and anti-Republican. Serious debate is reduced into question-and-answer games in which “gotcha” is more important than real dialogue.
In our current situation at home and abroad, we need a national dialogue – not divisive, shallow, media defined, knit picking.
Just take stock of the childish maneuvering over the proposed 2024 presidential debate.
The posturing and bias negotiating around the proposed ABC News debate between President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris exemplifies the dishonesty eating away at our free society.
Does anyone really think ABC will run an unbiased debate?
Vice President Harris’s longtime friend, Dana Walden is a senior Disney executive who oversees ABC News.
ABC reporter Jonathan Carl’s recent one-sided, hostile interview with Republican Sen. Tom Cotton was a performance so outrageous that President Trump called it “ridiculous and biased.” He said the ABC pundits were a “Panel of Trump Haters.”
George Stephanopoulos, the host of ABC News This Week, worked for Democratic Presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, House Democratic Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, and Democratic President Bill Clinton. When Democrats go to work for television networks do you think they instantly become nonpartisan, neutral interviewers?
In 2016, Donna Brazile, twice acting chair of the Democratic Party, was accused of leaking a CNN town hall question to Hillary Clinton. Brazile now works for ABC.
And ABC is just one network.
The structure of the presidential debates have become nothing more than media spectacles. We have given total authority to reporters and commentators. They choose the topics and questions – and become supposed referees who correct candidates who say things with which the network doesn’t agree.
In 2012, CNN’s debate host Candy Crowley supposedly fact-checked Republican nominee Mitt Romney. It was an inappropriate intervention which made Romney look bad – and she was incorrect. The result was a lot of the post-debate talk about the moderator, not the candidates.
In 2020, Chris Wallace behaved as President Trump’s adversary. At one point Trump asked, “am I debating [Biden] or am I debating you?” It was essentially a two-on-one debate with Wallace and Biden on one side and Trump on the other.
When I was on the debate stage in 2012, the news media almost always asked questions with a liberal bias and often with open or implied hostility. Many of the most memorable moments in the 2012 debates came from taking on the media for its overt bias and absurdly slanted questions.
These debates make the media moderator the central figure, and the candidates the respondents who must answer to the news media’s priorities and interests.
It is obvious why the news media loves this format. The media gets to decide which issues matter. The media controls the conversation.
Aside from pervasive media bias, the current presidential debate system reduces serious topics to one- to three-minute video clips. Enormous public policy questions, serious issues of constitutional theory, geopolitics, and the debate about the future of our country are reduced and engineered to drive web traffic rather than a national dialogue.
We should scrap the whole system.
Instead, we should look to the greatest political debates in American history, the 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas.
Lincoln and Douglas debated in a race to become the next U.S. Senator for Illinois at a time when the issues were profound. The differences in opinion were ultimately settled by a Civil War which cost more American lives than all our wars up through Vietnam.
The Lincoln-Douglas debates were brilliant. They represented a profound discourse on the nature of America and the principles of self-government –second only perhaps to the Federalist Papers.
There were seven Lincoln-Douglas debates. In each debate, one candidate opened for an hour. The second candidate then had an hour-and-a-half to rebut his opponent and make his own case. The first candidate then had 30 minutes to give a final rebuttal and summary. They alternated who started each debate. The incumbent Douglas started four times, and the challenger Lincoln led three times.
The debates were intensely covered by the media – not run by the media. After the election, Lincoln collected newspaper transcriptions of each debate and had them printed in a book. It sold widely and was a major factor in his rise to become a Republican presidential candidate in 1860. Ironically, Lincoln got more popular votes than Douglas, but the state legislature in that era chose the U.S. Senator. The Democrats won more seats in the state house. Douglas went back to the Senate, and Lincoln went on to the White House, becoming one of our greatest presidents.
Why not have a variation of this serious approach with a series of Presidential Dialogues on C-SPAN? The two candidates can agree on broad general topics – and a format which includes coherent written statements and alternating questions and answers.
This would bring unbiased dialogue to the American people, focus on real challenges, and allow the candidates to behave with the seriousness and knowledge befitting American presidents.
For more commentary from Newt Gingrich, visit Gingrich360.com. Also, subscribe to the Newt’s World podcast.
