The Anything But Courageous Debate

I missed the debate Wednesday night. I'm very happy about that, because my TV still works, and I cannot guarantee it would not have had a large hole in it afterward. So, I wake up the next day to check the politics reddit, just to see what some people are saying, and all of the top ten (12 of the top 15) links were separate complaints about the debate. It was shocking how unified everyone was writing about the horrible lack of substance and stampede of right-wing attack that passed for a debate on ABC. Glenn Greenwald bats leadoff here, as always in dealing with media nonsense:

My favorite (unintentionally revealing) media commentary about the debate is from The Washington Post's Anne Kornblut and Dan Balz, who devoted paragraph after paragraph to describing the substance-free "issues" that consumed most of the debate -- Obama's "remarks about small-town values, questions about his patriotism and the incendiary sermons of his former pastor . . . gaffes, missteps and past statements" -- and, at the end of the article, they added:

The debate also touched on Iraq, Iran, the Middle East, taxes, the economy, guns and affirmative action.

It's just not possible to express the wretched state of our establishment press better than that sentence does.

And over at Kos, Hunter presents the idea that this sham of a debate was just as historic as Obama's speech on race, but in a much more sinister sense:

What a contrast. Only a few weeks ago, we were presented with what was considered by many to be a historic speech by a presidential candidate on race in America -- historic for its substance, tone, delivery, and stark candor. Last night, we had an opposing, equally historic example -- and I sincerely mean that, I consider it to be every bit as significant as that word implies -- of the collapse of the political press into self-willed incompetence. You might as well pull any half-intelligent person off the street, and they would unquestionably have more difficult and significant questions for the two candidates. It was not merely a momentarily bad performance, by ABC, it was a debate explicitly designed to be what it was, which is far more telling.

Read the whole thing. I'm tempted to agree. There was such outrage than even Howie Kurtz, media critic extraordinaire, decried it, not just the lefty blogs. Maybe this embarrassment to the profession will be a wake-up call to the traditional media. Maybe they'll start to realize people care, and we can begin the healing process. The cynic is me still doubts.

And for a bigger sampling of the outrage, here's a summary from AMERICABlog.