Ronna McDaniel’s NBC circus is not a ‘debate’
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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The two-hour extravaganza starring five of the six front-runners in the Republican presidential primary certainly had a high production value, but by the technical definition of the term, NBC News’s revue was not actually a debate. One would assume that if the Republican National Committee, which has aggressively threatened candidates from participating in conclaves ranging from Fox News to Bob Vander Plaats’s famous Thanksgiving Family Forum, decided to grant rare debate hosting honors to a network as hostile to conservatives as NBC, that NBC would be expected to force the field to actually spar against each other. Yet NBC’s Lester Holt and Kristen Welker seemed less interested in the candidates differentiating themselves and more in asserting their own authority.
Holt’s and Welker’s lines of questioning were as liberal leaning as we would expect not just from NBC in general, which aggressively pushed the Russia collusion hoax, but also from their previous gigs hosting presidential debates. But their failure stemmed more from their refusal to let candidates respond to each other, instead allowing tensions to boil over and threaten their control over the debate. The moderators also unwisely decided to scold the audience not once but twice in the first 10 minutes of the debate.
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None of this is to mention the fact that it took a full 42 minutes, or more than one-third, into the debate for the third moderator, conservative talk radio legend Hugh Hewitt, to be able to get in a single question. (Hewitt’s prolonged line of questioning involved grilling candidates on the individual ships they would commission to add to the U.S. Navy.)
The buck, of course, ultimately rests with RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. Her constantly shifting debate standards and refusal to exert any actual control over the GOP machine meant that also-rans like former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie got to share precious debate time with double-digit contenders like former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). Meanwhile, McDaniel’s boss and patron, former President Donald Trump, considered the debate so irrelevant that he skipped his third in a row.
Moderators have a right and a duty to shut off microphones in cases of careless candidates refusing to respect their allotted times, but NBC was more interested in a spectacle than scrutinizing the 2024 decision.