GOP Should Just Say No To Biased Debates

Brent Bozell is in high dudgeon over these atrocious debates – as well he should be:

Sitting through the Republican debate on Saturday night with ABCs George Stephanopoulos was just painful, from beginning to end. Some of it was just political Ambien. But when it was finally over, there was just one question: Who in the GOP in his or her right mind invites a historically shameless Democratic spin controller like Stephanopoulos to “moderate” a primary debate like this — ever?

The only thing that can be said in defense of that horrible decision was turning to NBC the next morning and seeing “moderator” David Gregory be even more slanted in his questioning. ABC slanted the ideological questions in their debate by a ratio of 6 questions from the left to each 1 from the right. The NBC ratio was 8 to 1.

Why must the Republicans keep handing over their debate stage in the primary season to the people who desperately want them all to bumble, stumble and fall on their faces on national TV?

In the ABC debate — an event held for Republican voters presumably to decide who is reliably conservative enough to win the nomination — ABC asked three questions from the conservative perspective and 20 from the left (25 were ideologically neutral). Twelve of the 48 questions, or 25 percent of the night’s total, were devoted to promoting contraception and gay marriage, so trite and repetitive that finally the audience booed them down.

I’ve been wondering the same thing. It’s a Republican primary. Why would our candidates agree to hold their debates on hostile ground? Don’t they have a say in the matter? Why not say no to ABC, CNN, NBC, and CBS if they can’t hold a debate in a fair, unbiased manner? Perhaps they think that it would be spun that they are too afraid to answer tough questions. But the ideological questions weren’t tough – they were just stupid – contraception and gay marriage are not the top issues of the day. The questions were  designed to make Republicans look foolish, or outside the mainstream.

I was talking to a friend about the primary race, the other day, and asked her what she thought of Rick Santorum. She thought he was focused too much on social issues like contraception, when there are much more important issues to worry about.

Rick Santorum is not obsessed with contraception. Reporters are obsessed with asking him about contraception, which makes him look like he’s obsessed with contraception. And because of that – it’s become a campaign issue. Nice work, LSM.

And although support for gay marriage has increased over the years, opposing it is not outside the mainstream. 

Rasmussen polled voters to find out what the most important issues on their minds were going in to the 2012 election season. Keep in mind – these are all voters, not just Republican voters:

Economy	80%
Health Care	67%
Gov’t Ethics and Corruption	65%
Taxes	60%
Social Security	60%
Education	60%
Immigration	49%
National Security/War on Terror	48%
Afghanistan	24%
War in Iraq	19%

Yet 25 percent of  questions asked at the ABC debate were about contraception and gay marriage?

I’m with Don Surber, who concluded his post about ABC’s debate bias:

In the fall, Republicans should not allow anyone from ABC to moderate any debate because the network was unserious and insincere on Saturday night.

I would add NBC, as well.

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