RNC chairman Reince Priebus
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus had a message for NBC on Friday: You’re fired.
The RNC said it was “suspending” its partnership with NBC News on Friday due to the disastrous CNBC debate in Boulder, Colorado, Wednesday night. Priebus has been under fire from conservatives for agreeing to the debate, which featured a litany of biased questions by moderators Becky Quick, Carl Quintanilla and John Harwood.
A Republican debate with NBC was scheduled for Feb. 26, 2016, in Houston, Texas.
“The CNBC network is one of your media properties, and its handling of the debate was conducted in bad faith. We understand that NBC does not exercise full editorial control over CNBC’s journalistic approach. However, the network is an arm of your organization, and we need to ensure there is not a repeat performance,” Priebus said in a statement released Friday. “While debates are meant to include tough questions and contrast candidates’ visions and policies for the future of America, CNBC’s moderators engaged in a series of “gotcha” questions, petty and mean-spirited in tone, and designed to embarrass our candidates. What took place Wednesday night was not an attempt to give the American people a greater understanding of our candidates’ policies and ideas.”
The RNC’s decision came after conservative radio giants Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin excoriated Priebus and CNBC.
“Enough is enough,” Levin said on his show Thursday, WND reported. “I say that Reince Priebus should be fired over there at the Republican National Committee. … That guy’s an incompetent! He’s a boob!”
“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,” Limbaugh said Thursday.
GOP debate on Oct. 28
Priebus also moved quickly to appease irate candidates plotting a way to work around the RNC.
Multiple sources told Politico on Wednesday that representatives for Dr. Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Sen. Lindsey Graham, Mike Huckabee, Gov. Bobby Jindal, Sen. Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, and Donald Trump were all planning to meet in Washington, D.C. to discuss the debate process.
“It’s not about me and gotcha questions. It’s about the American people and whether they have the right to hear what we think,” Carson said before an event at Colorado Christian University on Thursday, Politico reported. “The whole format was just craziness. … You’ve got to be really bad for the whole crowd to boo you.”
If the RNC was thinking of forgiving CNBC, the network did itself no favors.
CNBC’s Eric Chemi wrote a piece Thursday, “College-level speaking not required at the GOP debates,” on the Flesch-Kincaid readability test to cast aspersions on the candidates’ intelligence.
“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. And at least one front-runner was in elementary school territory,” wrote Chemi.
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. It is not as a measure of intelligence, WND reported Thursday.
Priebus left open the possibility of resuming a partnership with NBC, “pending further discussion between the RNC and our presidential campaigns.”
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