From the last Morning Jolt of the week:

The Most Unexpected Member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy: Matt Lauer
Man, Hillary’s biggest fans in the media are just blisteringly furious with Matt Lauer.
Journalists and longtime political observers pounced. “How in the hell does Lauer not factcheck Trump lying about Iraq? This is embarrassingly bad,” wrote Tommy Vietor, a former aide to President Obama. Glenn Kessler, the chief fact checker at The Washington Post, posted a link to NBC’s check of Mr. Trump’s claim and wrote: “@MLauer should have been prepared to do this.”
“Lauer interrupted Clinton’s answers repeatedly to move on. Not once for Trump,” Norman Ornstein, the political commentator, wrote in a Twitter message, adding: “Tough to be a woman running for president.”
On social media, surrogates for Mrs. Clinton began mounting a sustained attack on the anchor. “Imagine if @NBCNews had done its job,” wrote Nick Merrill, her press secretary, on Twitter. Neera Tanden, a close Clinton ally, was even harsher: “I guess the good news is that Matt Lauer isn’t moderating an actual debate,” she wrote.
Adam Green, co-founder, Progressive Change Campaign Committee, concluded, “This forum was an absolute disgrace. Matt Lauer treated this forum less as a chance to educate voters about the real differences in temperament and policy between the candidates and more as a chance to do clickbait trolling.”
Some of Lauer’s critics were pretty explicit about their intent to put pressure on the moderator of the first debate. Morris Pearl, the chair of Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy progressives fighting for tax increases, put Lester Holt on notice:
I am deeply disappointed in Matt Lauer’s performance last night. At a moment when Americans are desperately looking for the right answers, Mr. Lauer failed to even ask the right questions. We hope that NBC will redeem itself at the first national presidential debate to be held on September 26th by both asking the right questions, and demanding the candidates actually answer them. In particular, we hope that Lester Holt will ask the candidates about their plans to repair our American democracy, which is currently under egregious attacks by monied interests and unscrupulous politicians who use disenfranchisement as a political strategy.
Let’s face it, the real damage to Hillary Clinton didn’t come from anything Lauer said. It came from one particular question in the audience, one that spotlighted the insanely lenient standard applied to the Democratic nominee:
JACKSON: Hi, Matt. I’m with Lieutenant Jon Lester (ph), who will stand with me here. He began his military career by enlisting in the Air Force and then switched over to the Navy before he retired, where he flew P-3 Orions in Desert Storm and in Desert Shield. He’s a Republican, and he has this question for you, Secretary Clinton.
CLINTON: Thank you.
QUESTION: Secretary Clinton, thank you very much for coming tonight. As a naval flight officer, I held a top secret sensitive compartmentalized information clearance. And that provided me access to materials and information highly sensitive to our war-fighting capabilities. Had I communicated this information not following prescribed protocols, I would have been prosecuted and imprisoned. Secretary Clinton, how can you expect those such as myself who were and are entrusted with America’s most sensitive information to have any confidence in your leadership as president when you clearly corrupted our national security?
Recall a portion of Clinton’s answer was “I did exactly what I should have done” which is completely, laughably false.
You’re also hearing enormous griping from seemingly every corner that less than thirty minutes (the introductions took a few minutes) provided way too little time to have a worthwhile discussion of serious military and veterans issues. Indeed, it probably is too short a time period. But both campaigns agreed to that time limit. If you’re Hillary Clinton, and you’re convinced you know these policy issues backwards and forwards, inside and out, why not agree to go longer? For Trump, a brief nationally-televised appearance makes sense: Send him out there, let him talk about how much the current VA is a disgrace and how much he loves veterans, hope he doesn’t say “take the oil” too many times, and get him off.
But Hillary’s campaign wanted it kept to a half-hour, too. Why?