CNBC’s handling of the GOP debate in Boulder, Colorado, Wednesday night earned the network a well-deserved “brutal takedown,” according to one columnist.
So how did CNBC respond to widespread criticism of its questions to presidential candidates that included “Are you a comic-book villain?” “Why don’t you resign?” and “Can you do math?”
By dumping on the candidates over the number of syllables in their words and the length of their sentences.
Huh?
Under the headline “College-level speaking not required at the GOP debates, CNBC’s Eric Chemi used the well-known Flesch-Kincaid readability test to peg Cruz’s speaking at a ninth-grade level and Donald Trump’s at fifth-grade. The other candidates were in the range of upper sixth-grade to upper seventh-grade.
But the Flesch-Kincaid test – which tests writing, not speaking – is often taught in journalism schools to help writers make their prose more readable to a broad audience, not as a measure of eruditeness. Time magazine is written at about a ninth-grade level, for example. The formula was first used by the Army in 1978 to assess the difficulty of technical manuals. Many states have now employed it, requiring that documents be written at no higher than a ninth-grade level.
The GOP candidates in Boulder, led by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, called out the anti-Republican bias.
Cruz recited questions that had been posed to his rivals.
“Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, will you insult two people over here? Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?” he said.
The audience cheered.
Cruz noted the contrast with the Democrats’ only debate so far, hosted by CNN, “where every fawning question was: Which of you is more handsome and wise?”
Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe said “the media” was the big loser Wednesday night.
He called Cruz’s comments a “brutal takedown,” asserting CNBC’s “smarmy moderators had it coming.”
“Cruz is far from the first conservative to rail against liberal media bias, but he did it about as effectively as it can be done in 30 seconds. The clip of that moment will go viral. It may or may not give a boost to Cruz’s presidential hopes, but it will certainly reinforce the public’s sense that the mainstream media isn’t trustworthy.”
On Twitter, actor Rob Lowe summed up the reaction to CNBC’s debate management strategy: “Sweet Jesus, I’ve never seen a network get a shellacking like CNBC is taking for their GOP debate. Yikes.”
What do YOU think? Who should grill Republicans in the next debate? Sound off in today’s WND poll
As if not even aware that its judgment was under challenge, CNBC followed up Thursday with a critique of the candidates’ word and sentence lengths.
“In debates rife with confrontation and verbal barbs, there was one thing that wasn’t a big surprise: Nobody was speaking above a high school level,” the report said. “And at least one front-runner was in elementary school territory,” CNBC’s Chemi wrote.
“Easy speech. Small sentences. Short words. No big words. That’s the key. At future debates, expect to hear things like this: ‘This country is in big trouble. We don’t win anymore. We lose to China.’ And … ‘We’ll find solutions. And the world will respect us. They will respect us like never before.’”
CNBC said in another headline – after having posed questions about resigning, comic books and the like – “GOP debate comes up short on tax, budget solutions.”
Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh unleashed on CNBC.
“Bias doesn’t even cover what happened last night. That was a kill show last night. That show was designed to kill every one of those candidates. That debate last night was designed to take them all out. That debate last night was to grease the skids for Hillary Clinton. That was the sole purpose of that debate last night.
“And the smugness and the arrogance and the condescension with which those moderators went about it finally came back and bit them to the point that everybody watching the debate, everybody, even other Drive-By Media types, saw what was going on,” he said.
“I started fuming with that very first question: Please tell us what is your biggest weakness. Right then you knew the table was set, you knew what was coming. And it ticked me off that some of our people even deigned to answer it. The whole premise behind that question is, tell us why you’re not qualified. And if there was a theme to this debate last night from these moderators, it was to expose the fact that these fine people, any one of which would be preferable to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, is not qualified.”
He said the GOP should think better of even allowing such debates to be held by certain media entities.
“We all know, everybody knows, they are the enemy. They’re not just the media. They are the enemy, and yet the scheduling continues. And we all know why. The Republican Party, inside the Beltway, the establishment, whatever you want to call it, thinks they have to bend over backward to prove their fairness, that they are not all of these things they’re alleged to be.”
Were the moderators – Becky Quick, Carl Quintanilla and John Harwood – embarrassed?
“They didn’t care. To them, today it’s mission accomplished. A, everybody’s talking about them. B, when they talk among themselves they’re congratulating themselves for actually characterizing Trump as a cartoon character, Ben Carson as being stupid and shallow, and on down the list. They think mission accomplished. … They’re not feeling chagrined. They’re not embarrassed.”
CNN said its sources were reporting that representatives of several of the candidates “are planning to take their grievances to the Republican National Committee.”
Ben Carson told reporters on Thursday he is demanding a new debate format and is asking other candidates to join forces.
“Debates are supposed to be to get to know the candidates, what is behind them. What it has turned into is a gotcha,” Carson said.
Sergio Gor, a spokesman for Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told CNN, “We thought CNBC did a horrendous job and a disservice, and we agree with the RNC that they should be ashamed of themselves.”
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s objected to a question about regulating a fantasy football company: “Wait a second, we have $19 trillion in debt, we have people out of work, we have ISIS and al-Qaida attacking us and we’re talking about fantasy football? Can we stop?”
On the Drudge Report, recognized for its influence on the nation’s news agenda, was the headline “Shame of the Nation” with a photo of the three moderators.
John Nolte tweeted, “I’ve never seen moderating veer quite so far off the course of serving viewers and democracy as I saw on CNBC.”
Bernard Goldberg said, “Ther @CNBC moderators acted less like journalists and more like Clinton campaign operatives.”
Politico said: “Nobody watching at home believes that any of the moderators have any intention of voting in a Republican primary.”
What is disturbing, Limbaugh said, that CNBC executives won’t see any problem with their network’s performance.
“They’re not worried. Damage control would be the max. But they’re not humiliated. They don’t think they’ve been exposed or anything. They don’t think this way. These people think of themselves every day they are constant winners. They have the power, solely and alone, they have the power. Nothing can knock them off of it. They are aligned with the Democratic Party.
“They are the most powerful political organization in the world, in their minds, and there’s nothing a little debate last night’s gonna do to change that.
“I’m talking about their attitude,” he said.
Related stories:
‘This is suicide for Republicans’
Washington Post dubs CNBC loser of debate
GOP honchos now swooning over ‘amnesty man’
Kaboom! Cruz launches missile at debate hosts
GOP fireworks: 1 candidate makes crowd go wild
Media try to take down Carson at debate
Jindal: ‘You either trust the American people or you don’t’
Kasich unloads on Trump, Carson
Related columns:
The night I got to moderate presidential debate
Today’s system: Assisted suicide for America
Thank you, CNBC, for a wonderful evening
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