Private Sector Rises to Presidential Debate Challenge

The winners of the Trump-Biden debates could be Jake Tapper and Jonathan Karl, or their parent company shareholders

It looks like an agreement is emerging for President Biden and President Trump to have at least two debates, to be hosted by CNN and ABC News.

This is happening outside the “Commission on Presidential Debates” framework originally sponsored by the two major parties. It’s not being done by the Public Broadcasting Service or by National Public Radio or the Federal Election Commission or the Voice of America or a university.

There are plenty of problems with the for-profit press. I spend some of my time pointing them out. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accused Trump and Biden of “colluding” and “trying to exclude me from their debate.”

Yet for all the complaining about corporate-owned or corporate-dominated media, the uspide here is that perhaps it takes a big business like Disney-backed ABC or Warner Bros. Discovery’s CNN to provide an independent check on government. The ABC and CNN journalists aren’t perfect, but journalists such as CNN’s Jake Tapper and ABC’s Jonathan Karl aren’t reflexive leftists, either. They’ve shown themselves capable of being respectfully tough on administrations and politicians from both parties.

In mass-audience media, the route to commercial success involves not totally losing ideological touch with the mainstream of America. So though journalists tend to represent the interests of the well-paid, well-educated, Washington and New York crowd that are their social peer group, the best of them also don’t get too far away from common-sense American concerns. And the fact that they earn significant money, and work for big corporations, make them more sensitive to issues like marginal tax rates and corporate tax rates than other questioners might be.

CNN and ABC will be attacked by their peers in the rest of the press for anything less than ferociously anti-Trump realtime “fact checking.” The test of whether this new approach of debates outside the “Commission” format are worth repeating will be whether ABC and CNN come out of it looking fair and balanced rather than like Biden surrogates. The voters, after all, want mostly to hear mostly not from the television anchors but from the candidates, in a rare face-to-face, or at least side-by-side, interaction. If it goes, well, one winner of the presidential debates of 2024 could be capitalism, a great protector of journalistic independence and a system that creates strong counterweights to government power.

Recent work: “How the Pro-Hamas Campus Protests Are the Latest Version of the Blood Libel” is the headline over my latest piece for the Algemeiner. It quotes the essay by Ahad Ha’am, “Some Consolation,” written in 1892: “There is nothing more dangerous for a nation or for an individual than to plead guilty to imaginary sins.” And, “is it possible that everybody can be wrong, and the Jews right?”

He answered, “Yes, it is possible: the blood accusation proves it possible. Here, you see, the Jews are right and perfectly innocent.”

I thought of that earlier today when anti-Israel protesters disrupted a House Judiciary Committee subcommittee hearing on antisemitism by waving red hands, to symbolize blood-soaked, behind Rabbi Mark Goldfeder, who was testifying.

Anti-Israel protesters waving red hands symbolizing blood disrupt a congressional hearing before being removed. It says something that in 2024 in America a congressional hearing about antisemitism is disrupted by protesters echoing the classic blood libel.

If you are interested in this topic, please do check out the Algemeiner column.

Judiciary Committee subcommittee hearing: Speaking of the hearing of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution and limited government, it was a useful indication of where Republicans are headed on the issue.