How to fix these God-awful debates: No more journalists, no more moderators, no more questions

Here was my favorite headline of the week: 'Shell-shocked' CNBC staffers had long flight home Good. I hope they're having a long and horrible week too. When you're trusted with directing something as serious as a presidential debate, and instead you beclown yourself as these fools did, you don't deserve any rest. But this goes to a more fundamental problem about presidential debates in general, especially but not exclusively primary debates. When and why did we buy into the notion that debates must be led and directed by journalists prompting the participants with questions? Indeed, why do journalists get a participant role at all?

The only real reason we do this, as far as I can see, is that we've done it for a long time and we're used to it. Well, that and the fact that because this is a longstanding practice the media organizations themselves approach the parties with proposals to host the debates. What they're trying to do is what CNBC tried and failed spectacularly to do on Wednesday - boost their ratings and promote their on-air personalities. This is exactly why the moderators ask such idiotic questions. It's not about helping the public better understand the candidates. It's about making sure that the viewer remembers the name and the face of the person asking the question - and if the candidate stumbles over the question, so much the better. That probably started 27 years ago with this:

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However much you may find fault with Dukakis's answer - particuarly his complete lack of emotion in dealing with the description of his own wife's theoretical rape and murder, which was what really hurt him with voters - the fact of the matter is the question was obnoxious. If you want to know Dukakis's position on the death penalty, then just ask him that. Personalizing it like Shaw did was not about clarifying anyone's understanding of anything. It was about getting everyone to look at Bernard Shaw. And it worked. It boosted Shaw's name recognition and helped CNN to market his brand in association with their own. Ever since then, journalists who get tabbed as debate moderators have been looking for opportunities to manufacture similar everyone-look-at-me moments for themselves. And there is no reason for this, because there's no reason journalists need to be part of the debates at all. If you want to have a debate about issues, you could do that easily by having any college debate professor announce topics to be discussed among the candidates, along with clear ground rules that would govern the lengths of the responses, the way rebuttals would work and so on. Just direct them on what you want them to talk about. Tax policy. Spending. Regulatory policy. Health care. Foreign interventions. Whatever it is, give them a topic and let them decide what they want to say, then let the other candidates respond and rebut. Viewers can decide for themselves whether the candidates took the conversation in the right direction, and whether their proposed policy ideas make sense. But no, defenders of journalist involvement will say, you need experienced journalists on hand to "ask tough questions." No. You don't. If journalists want to ask candidates "tough questions," there is plenty of opportunity to do that on the campaign trail, in interviews, in press conferences and what-have-you. Tough questions can be useful and sometimes they're necessary, but they're not always the questions that really yield the best information. Sometimes those are the simplest and least adversarial questions: Please explain how your tax policy works and take as much time as you need to give me the detail. That's probably not what most in the media would call a "tough" question, but it's likely to give you a lot more information than the confrontational nonsense they usually toss out in debates. So no, "tough" questions are not always the best questions, and it's really not necessary in debates to prompt candidates with any questions at all. I'd find it much more informative to give the candidates wide latitude in deciding where to go with a given topic, as opposed to forcing them to answer a question that an individual journalist decides to ask. Approaching the debates as I'm suggesting here would also even out the playing field because all the candidates would be given the same prompting. You wouldn't have Trump being asked about what he said about women, Cruz being asked about shutting down the government, Carson being asked about his math, Rubio being asked about his attendance record, Bush being asked about his poll numbers . . . when that's the way it goes, it's really little more than a joint press conference involving 10 different people, with the questions completely scattered and often incoherent. It offers very little opportunity to get a substantive policy discussion going on anything. So fire the media from the moderator role and reconsider the whole idea of whether you even need moderators, as opposed to a dispassionate referee who announces topics, enforces rules and otherwise sits there and keeps his mouth shut. Someone in that role wouldn't even need to be seen on camera. The debate is not about him, after all. That's what the journalists who get asked to moderate don't understand. It's not about them. It's about picking a president, and they consistently fail to direct the debates in such a way that we are helped in doing so. I blame the political parties as much as I blame the journalists because they continue to go along with this nonsense. But the journalists will never change how they do this as long as they're allowed to keep doing it. So the parties have to take responsibility for making the change, and don't allow it any longer. This might improve the debates to the point where I would actually watch one. But not if it's on opposite the World Series. The only thing that would make that an easier choice would be to let Joe Buck moderate the debate.