The Not-So-Silly Debate Question

I have the news on TV in the house in the background while I work during the day.  So as I write this Tuesday afternoon, I am up to here with analysis of Monday night's debate.  There has been so much commentary, to the exclusion of almost all the rest of the day's news, that I truly feel I can't add anything insightful that wouldn't have been said eleven times by eleven different analysts and commentators.

In case you asked, I came down on the side of those who thought pretty much nothing should have changed in the polls; Trump was Trump and Hillary was Hillary.  We had probably forgotten what it meant to be Hillary, since she hadn't answered an unplanned question since 1947, but we remembered, after her plastic grin and condescending attitude reminded us who she is.  And yes, I thought Trump left about a billion dollars worth of points he could have made on the table.

But I have a different question.

Lester Holt was the moderator, as we all know, and I think it is fair to say that he was indeed fair, but indeed unbalanced.  His questions to Trump were not unfair; he certainly had a right to ask them, although some -- the birther thing for one -- were utterly irrelevant to the running of the country and wasted valuable minutes of a relatively brief debate.  However, Holt asked next to nothing of Hillary about comparable issues of contention -- Benghazi, the email server itself, the Clinton "Foundation", Uranium One.

What Holt said before the debate is a bit more relevant.  That would be when he admonished the audience to be silent during the ninety minutes of the debate itself.  Sit on your hands, make no sounds, he said.  For the most part, the audience complied.  Made up, it would seem, of some relative balance of supporters between the two candidates, there were only a few scattered times when they broke the silence.

But that is where the question comes in.  If there was a real problem with the potential of an audience making noise during the debate, and possibly influencing the TV audience's perception of what had happened, than why the heck was an audience in the auditorium in the first place?

Seriously, could they not simply have produced the debates in a spare television studio without an audience, exactly as the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960 were done?  We would have been spared all the worry about audience sounds, all the worry about production.  They could all be done in the same studio.

The talking heads could then be anywhere they wanted to be, watching on TV like the rest of us.  We would be spared the big spin room we all detest, as well as the previous day's features on the location of the debate (hint -- 44 songs by the Hofstra University band were not what we turn on the news to hear).

Moreover, I rather think that a studio debate would actually temper the tone, as well as the perceived importance of the debates.  Without an audience to play to, silent or not, the candidates could talk to the issues, and the moderators might actually ask questions of relevance to the viewer, like, you know, what their plan to reduce the national debt might be.

That isn't going to happen this cycle, but I would really like for the Commission on Presidential Debates, or whatever they might be, to give it a thought.

I think the product would improve, to the betterment of the USA.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There's a new post from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com at 10am Eastern time, every weekday, giving new meaning to "prolific essayist."  Sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.