Gunar Olsen’s study (12/15/15) of what gets asked and what’s left out of the primary debates was picked up by Common Dreams (12/15/15):
Twenty-eight of the non-policy questions (5 percent of all questions) might fairly be categorized as silly, e.g., “What would you want your Secret Service codename to be?” or “What are the three apps that you use most frequently on your cellphone?” or “Should the day after the Super Bowl be a national holiday?” Even the more substantive questions in this category, though, tended to illustrate Paul Waldman’s observation in the Washington Post (10/29/15) that “the defining characteristic of almost every debate in recent years is that the journalists doing the questioning go out of their way to try to create drama.”
