The Democratic National Committee has announced the lineups for its first two presidential primary debates, which will be hosted by NBC on June 26 and 27. For many voters, it will be their first real chance to learn about and evaluate the candidates. But despite new nods to diversity, there is little evidence so far to suggest that the debates will be any less circumscribed and shallow than those in the past.
In response to pressure from Democratic and environmental activists, DNC chair Tom Perez rejected the idea of holding a climate debate, because it “would be putting our thumb on the scale”—presumably not in favor of the planet, but on behalf of Jay Inslee, the candidate who requested the debate. It’s true that the scandal over the DNC’s scale-tipping for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries should make it sensitive to such concerns. The trouble is, the DNC builds the scale itself, and it’s hardly neutral to begin with.
By establishing thresholds for both polling and number of financial contributors that have to be reached in order to participate in debates (with more stringent thresholds in place for upcoming debates), the DNC throws the advantage to politicians who can afford the outrageously expensive online ad buys necessary to drum up far-flung supporters. And Inslee is far from the only candidate in favor of such a debate, as Perez suggested; more importantly, Democratic voters overwhelmingly want a climate debate, and they consistently name climate change and the environment as top issues.
But never fear; corporate media will take care of it: “I have the utmost confidence that, based on our conversations with networks, climate change will be discussed early and often during our party’s primary debates,” Perez wrote.
There are strong reasons to doubt this; there has been a near-blackout on climate-related questions in presidential and primary debates in the past several years. Even if the debates do raise climate questions, the particulars of the questions matter. In an entire debate devoted to climate change, candidates would be hard-pressed to evade specifics, but in two-hour events covering a wide range of issues, viewers will be lucky to get more than a couple of minutes on what is arguably the most complex emergency facing the next president—and some candidates will almost certainly escape climate questions entirely.
There are other serious issues facing the country—inequality, healthcare, racist police violence, immigration and reproductive justice jump to mind. If candidates are willing to spend a couple of hours comparing ideas on a particular topic, and voters are interested, why stand in the way?
NBC Democratic debate moderators José Diaz-Balart, Savannah Guthrie, Lester Holt, Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow.
The media hosts are also attempting to preempt voters’ concerns about diversity: The first host, NBC, has announced its moderator team, and four out of five are not non-Latino white men over the age of 45—quite a reversal of fortune for those in the latter category. This change has rightfully been praised, and hopefully the other media hosts will follow suit in future debates. But corporate diversity is still, ultimately, corporate, and we can still expect the range of ideas expressed to be sharply limited.
The hand-wringing over the inclusion of “opinionator” Rachel Maddow as a moderator highlights the lack of space for progressive perspectives in the debates. In the 2016 primaries, corporate media included right-wing commentator Hugh Hewitt alongside CNN anchors to question Republican primary candidates; no progressive commentator was included in a Democratic debate. Maddow, whose Russia obsession keeps her “left” perspective a safe distance from any challenge to MSNBC corporate advertisers, is unlikely to give voice to key progressive concerns in the way Hewitt unabashedly represented the right.
Instead, tightly controlled by the parties and the media, the televised debates prioritize style over substance, encouraging candidates to eschew clear policy positions in favor of bland platitudes. Of course, if corporate media’s goal were an informed electorate, voters would already know more about the candidates’ positions than about their jockeying in the polls, and the debates would carry less weight.
But beyond the DNC debates, media could elevate the conversation with more and better coverage of the candidate forums being organized to address particular topics—which, because they are “forums” and not “debates,” seem to evade the DNC’s ban on specificity. On June 17, for example, the Poor People’s Campaign held a forum on poverty and systemic racism, which nine candidates attended. Questions were mostly asked by poor people and activists rather than journalists, and the narrow focus meant that the candidates had to dive deep on an issue that was not raised by moderators in a single one of the nine DNC debates in the last election cycle.
As the first event in which Biden faced his opponents, the forum received fairly widespread coverage, but most outlets focused almost exclusively on Biden (e.g., Washington Post), with some covering only his comments on bipartisanship, not poverty (e.g., Newsweek). Even in the New York Times, which refreshingly treated the event itself as newsworthy, key voices were notably absent: those of the poor.
What’s not debatable
Corpress confinement to the conventional lack of wisdom
Julie, great article. Major media control of Debates will always result in a very narrow scope. Once Bernie takes the presidency, we might get a true public media funded so we won’t have to listen to lies and distortions 24 hours a day.
Yours,
James
I find unwarranted the notion that having young, hispanic moderators has any special positive significance. Tom Perez himself is a second generation Latino and he himself, as chair of DNC, is the one most responsible for squelching the real concerns of the Democratic Party constituency on the Green New Deal. He’s just another corporate democrat who has done nothing special in acknowledging the values, needs and desires of the rank-and-file. Likewise, Clarence Thomas, as a black man, is the most conservative anti-civil-rights person on the Supreme Court. Hillary Clinton, a Christian religious woman, as Obama’s Secretary of State for Obama, with her tough-love militaristic Methodism, was mouthpiece for the CIA-sponsored overthrow of Libya which resulted in an entirely predictable descent into right-wing fundamentalist Muslim Chaos. And speaking of Obama, the black President — he’s someone who, through the example of J. Edgar Hoover’s spying on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, should have been sensitized to the evils of illegal government invasions of privacy. Instead, Obama supported the prosecution of Edward Snowden, a whistleblower who revealed a vast illegal spying network by the NSA against its own citizens.
So, you’ll forgive me if I don’t get all that excited about people with Hispanic names. Policy is what matters. The very idea that a FAIR article would think that identity politics has anything to do with justice is not supported by historical social movements in America for change. If you take a close look at the Civil Rights Movement in America, you see in 1968 75% of Americans did not approve of what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was doing. There were lots of white people in the movement, Native Americans, poor people across ethnic and color lines. Sensitivity to racial identity and cultural histories is important, but it should not be used as the primary moral principle. The corporate wing of the democratic party is guilty of not organizing according to values, but simply using psychological and cultural and ethnic identity as a “quick and dirty” way to get out the vote. Such a standpoint displays lack of a moral compass.
“There are other serious issues facing the country—inequality, healthcare, racist police violence, immigration and reproductive justice jump to mind.”
But Amerika’s endless wars don’t come to mind? Not a single mention of war and peace, the theft of our futures by the MIC, nor the existential danger of aggression against nuclear Russia in the entire article.
Perhaps that’s because the leading Democratic candidates has moved further Right on these most-vital issues than even Republican chickenhawks. But in any case, leaving it out of an article ostensibly about the blinkered narrowness of DNC Primary Theater is just not FAIR, Julie.
Kim, such a great point. The state of permanent war and the endless fueling of the defense budget and the military industrial complex is never addressed. This is one of the reasons the great Cornel West endorsed Jill Stein in 2016 once HRC won the nomination. Democrats of all stripes are afraid to address the growing US empire. You will also notice that the “left” had a decent anti-war movement from 2001 to 2008 but that all changed when Obama took office and these same activists remained silent because Obama charmed them into thinking he was different but continued and in many cases exacerbated further war crimes.
What Julie fails to mention here is that the so-called Poor People’s Campaign was moderated by MSNBC host and former Obama staffer Joy Reid. If you watch the forum with William Barber, you will see that the questions were very narrow and the event stayed within the confines of what has been deemed acceptable by MSNBC. This should be a teachable moment that most of these alleged “progressive” events, forums and debates are being watered down and continue to allow the corporate indentured candidates to avoid these important issues.
The complete omission of foreign policy from the debates—and, alas, no mention of it in Julie’s critique—is deeply problematic. It
suggests that the DNC and the candidates, except perhaps Tulsi Gabbard, stray far from the party line or wish to stir controversy. While the former is more likely, neither bodes well for the future.