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.

The chairman of the subcommittee, Chip Roy, a Republican of Texas, said, “Harvard is sitting on a $50 billion endowment, $50 billion, most of which is tax free. Penn, $20 billion endowment. Yet we continue to have taxpayer dollars flow to these universities while they are treating our Jewish brothers and sisters as we have seen unfold before our very eyes these past few weeks.”

The Harvard student, Shabbos Kestenbaum, and the University of Pennsylvania student, Eyal Yakoby, who testified both spoke about unresponsiveness by their universities and about how the anti-Israel protesters are also anti-American.

 “It’s about hating Western values,” Kestenbaum said.

“The same people who are waving the flag of Hamas are burning the flag of the United States,” Yakoby said.

You might dismiss the student comments as unrepresentative or somehow over the top, but then check X or Twitter and see Rabbi David Wolpe posting an excerpt of a note that a Harvard teaching fellow in a course on American novels sent to students in a class at Harvard.

“While our formal study this semester has ended, debates about the American self, culture, and freedoms and ongoing and unfolding in a lively way right here on Harvard’s campus. Concerted efforts to divest these united states from imperial and colonial projects around the world—and thereby to engender freedom, self-determination, and liberation for more of earth’s inhabitants—are being foregrounded by the Harvard students, faculty, and staff who are calling for the university to disentangle itself from weapons manufacturers and settler-colonial states that use indiscriminate violence against civilians,” the note says. “If you haven’t yet visited the encampment in Harvard Yard, which regularly hosts teach-ins and opportunities for ongoing study that directly or indirectly cut to the core of American culture and freedom, I highly recommend stopping by to continue learning and thinking about many of the questions with which we have grappled this semester.”

Wolpe cited it as an example of “the depth of the rot,” a phrase echoed by the former dean of Harvard medical school, Jeffrey Flier, who is a co-president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard.

The highlight of the hearing in my view came from Rep. Wesley Hunt, a Republican from Texas. “I went to West Point. I fought beside my Jewish friends. I went to Cornell University for grad school. I learned beside my Jewish friends. And you should see the emails and text messages that I am getting from my Jewish friends that I grew up with. I want to let you know that I have their back, and I have your back,” he told Kestenbaum and Yakoby.

 “We are all Americans and we all should be treated fairly in this country,” he said.

“If you are leaders on these campuses right now, you are failing us,” he said. “I  went to Cornell for grad school: failure. Columbia: failure. Harvard: failure. Fix it, right now.”