Presidential debates are essential to the proper functioning of a democracy, and the moderator of such debates plays a crucial role. After all, the person who asks the questions holds the power to control which subjects are discussed by the candidates, and, perhaps more importantly, which subjects are hidden away out of view.
Fox News moderated the first Republican presidential debate of the 2016 election, and in so doing it failed the nation miserably.
The problem was not that Fox was afraid to ask tough questions. No. Fox threw some hard-hitting punches all right. It nailed Scott Walker to the wall on his staunch opposition to abortion in cases of health risks to the mother when it expressed disdain that Mr. Walker would actually stand by and allow a mother to die instead of granting her access to an abortion that would save her life.
Fox nailed Ben Carson by listing a string of his prior idiotic statements, such as Mr. Carson having no idea that Baltic nations were included in NATO. That list of items really made Mr. Carson appear woefully unfit for the office of president of the United States.
It nailed Chris Christie by rattling-off a slew of statistics that demonstrated the poor condition of the state of New Jersey under Mr. Christie's governorship.
And Fox nailed Donald Trump by recounting some of the slurs he had made against women, such as calling one a "fat pig" and saying that another belonged down on her knees.
Wow. Those are some pretty tough questions (not to mention some pretty pathetic candidates). But there was method here to Fox's madness.
By asking these tough questions, Fox created the impression that it was a hard-hitting moderator. The audience was led to believe that Fox was impartial, and that it really would dig down deep on the issues and extract the truth from these candidates all for the benefit of the American people. How wonderful.
But alas, for this is not what Fox was up to.
The reality of the matter is that the debate itself was boring. The most interesting aspect to the debate was these zinger questions. But the debate itself contained hardly any substance at all. The candidates said nothing new, no one really excelled or failed (despite the hype we will undoubtedly hear in the media), and we did not get much of a sense of the differences between the candidates.
Now, let's cut Fox some slack here in one respect. The circumstances of this debate were very challenging indeed. With 10 candidates and only two hours, it would be very difficult to construct a format that would lead to any meaningful exchanges at all. With each candidate restricted to having only one minute to answer each question, no candidate could possibly provide any level of real substance or detail. And there simply was not enough time for the moderators to follow-up with the candidates to press for greater specifics. As a result, all of the answers were limited to very surface and well-rehearsed statements, many of which did not even answer the questions that were asked, and the moderators could not effectively dig any deeper. This was a significant reason that the debate was so dull and boring.
But we cannot let Fox off the hook here entirely because Fox did fail us in a big way.
Fox failed to ask the candidates any meaningful questions whatsoever about the greatest issue facing our society today: namely, income inequality and the dominance of large corporations. On this we got nothing. Zippo, zero, zilch.
How could this be?
The reason seems apparent. Fox itself has an undisclosed agenda of favoring the wealthy and big business. These interests are not served by asking troubling questions of the candidates about the economic disparities that are plaguing our society.
In fact, the lack of Fox's impartiality was on full display right off-the-bat. The opening question of the debate was to ask the candidates to vow that they would not seek to run as an independent third-party candidate against the Republican Party. Of course, this was aimed squarely at Donald Trump who has been subtly threatening to do exactly that, and true to form, Mr. Trump was the only candidate to preserve his right to run as an independent.
This set the Fox moderators off into a bit of a tizzy and they hung-up the debate over this question. They were visibly disturbed. They pressed Mr. Trump on this issue and suggested that such an act would be an outrageous sacrilege because it would surely split the Republican Party and thereby hand the election to the Democrats. Horror of horrors!
Clearly, these moderators were not impartial. They plainly had an agenda that they were not disclosing, although it was quite apparent that part of their agenda included the Republican Party winning the presidency in 2016. When the powerful moderator of the debate is harboring an undisclosed agenda, it is clear that the debate will not be about seeking the truth for the benefit of the American people.
As a result, the nation was betrayed by Fox. The audience was distracted by the spectacle of the controversial questions. And Fox repeatedly attempted to goad the candidates into fighting with each other to create fireworks. At one point, Fox specifically instructed Mr. Trump to turn and face Jeb Bush and tell him directly why he was wrong. The candidates mostly avoided taking the bait.
But this left the American people out in the cold. We did not hear what the candidates think about income inequality. We did not hear what the candidates would do about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. We did not hear what the candidates would do about the disappearing middle class. We did not hear about the influence of billionaire money in politics.
We did not hear anything about what is perhaps the largest problem facing our society today.
If the goal of the moderator was to protect the wealthy and powerful by distracting attention away from the enormous issue of wealth disparity, then Fox achieved great success.
But for the great majority of the population who belong to the middle and lower classes, Fox as a moderator was a dismal failure.