After CNBC’s dismal moderating last week, Republicans are trying to avoid having their debates run by other Larrys, Curlys, and Moes — and, naturally, the mainstream media is in full-on histrionics. Over at the Washington Examiner, T. Becket Adams chronicles the fallout:
“If media outlets give candidates veto power over moderators then our democracy is truly broken. Time for us all to take a stand,” ABC News’ Matthew Dowd said.
New York Times magazine’s Julia Ioffe quipped, “For candidates who so love shouting about freedom, they’re weirdly uncomfortable with the freedom of the press to ask them questions.” . . .
The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza said incredulously, “Imagine if Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton teamed up to demand editorial control over how TV networks covered them?”
“Is there precedent 4 politicians demanding editorial control over news decisions like this?” he asked later.
The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple wondered aloud, “Haven’t seen media orgs rushing to denounce idea that candidates could control bios/graphics in debates. Did I miss something here?”
“Do these Republican candidates think they’re running for president of North Korea?” the Daily Beast’s Olivia Nuzzi asked. “Imagine what any candidate whining about the debates would do to freedom of speech if they were elected president.”
“The CNBC debate was a disaster, but f***ing suck it up,” she added.
Apocalypse now! Nuzzi was one Wikipedia search away from calling Republicans aspiring Hitlers — which would have been less moronic, still, than Dowd’s notion that the clash over GOP primary-debate procedures is our Thermopylae.
Thought experiment: What if the DNC had lined up a Democratic debate to be aired on Fox News and moderated by Fox anchors? Oh, wait:
Absent from these criticisms is any mention of when the Democratic National Committee blocked Fox News in 2007 from hosting a primary debate. Left-leaning bloggers, the 2008 presidential candidates, including then-Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and the DNC itself complained that Fox was too biased to handle the job. As a result, the cable news giant was unable to participate in the primary process, as the DNC outright denied it a “formal stamp of approval” for a debate.
So perhaps this gush of self-important sanctimony is not entirely in the interest of the First Amendment? Well!
Need more evidence? When she’s not in high dudgeon about the by God Rule of Law in this country, Julia Ioffe, quoted above, can be found . . . defending the removal of a Washington Post reporter from a meeting between secretary of state John Kerry and Uzbekistan president Islam Karimov:
She asked a question about human rights, which was not the focus of the meeting. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 https://t.co/hv14zyJDXy
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) November 2, 2015
By the by, she tweeted that yesterday.
So, in conclusion: Freedom of the press is absolute and indispensable! Well, until it inconveniences Democrats.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace removed the reporter from Secretary Kerry’s meeting. Carnegie was not involved in that incident, which took place in Uzbekistan.