Debate moderators announced for presidential debates

[OscarQ]

Debate 1:  Lester Holt
2:  Cooper and Martha Raddatz
3:  Chris Wallace
VP:  Elaine Quijano

www.cbsnews.com/news/debate-moderators-announced-for-general-election-debates/

The nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) revealed Friday the moderators for the three presidential debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, along with the moderator for the single vice presidential forum between Tim Kaine and Mike Pence.

NBC News’ Lester Holt will moderate the first presidential debate, scheduled for Sept. 26 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York.

According to the CPD, the debate will be divided into six segments of about 15 minutes each on major topics to be selected by the moderator and announced at least one week before the debate.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper and ABC News’ Martha Raddatz will ask questions of the candidates in the second debate on Oct. 19 at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. This debate will take the form of a town hall meeting, where half of the questions will be posed directly by participants. The other half will be asked by the moderators. Town hall participants will be uncommitted voters selected by the Gallup Organization.

“Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace will moderate the third debate on Oct. 19, which will be held at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas campus. The third debate will take the same format as the first forum.

CBSN anchor and CBS News correspondent Elaine Quijano has been named the moderator of the vice presidential debate, which will take place on Oc. 4, 2016 at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia. It will be the only veep forum between Democratic Sen. Kaine of Virginia and Republican Gov. Pence of Indiana.

Quijano will be the first anchor of a digital network to moderate a national debate in a general election campaign. In the vice presidential debate, the time will be divided into nine segments with about 10 minutes of discussion on each topic, and the moderator alone will determine the questions to be asked.

[isabel]

These seem like good picks to me.

[WanderingWinoZ]

is there usually only 1 person?
I'm used to seeing several, or is that only for the party primaries?

[looseseal]

I was kind of hoping John Dickerson would be one, because I like listening to him on Slate's political podcast. I don't know some of these because I don't watch television news programming very often.

[BlondeSpiders]

I wonder if the choice of Chris Wallace was to mollify Trump. He's not the most "fair and balanced" guy out there, and his unequivocal support of Roger Ailes makes me question any semblance of impartiality.

[Deleted]

Sept 2, 2016 11:18:53 GMT -5 WanderingWinoZ said:

is there usually only 1 person?
I'm used to seeing several, or is that only for the party primaries?

I think there's usually only one but I'm only going on my memory of Queen Latifah's impression on SNL of Gwen Ifill moderating the VP debates in 2008.

[OscarQ]

Sept 2, 2016 11:18:53 GMT -5 WanderingWinoZ said:

is there usually only 1 person?
I'm used to seeing several, or is that only for the party primaries?

The Commission on Presidential Debates has their shit together.  I'm impressed.  Debate history including moderator and format details. Yes, seems that a single moderator is the norm (I only looked back to 2000 and am wondering who Jim Lehrer bribed to basically get all the debates with one exception that year).  www.debates.org/index.php?page=2012-debates

Okay, I looked back further. Seriously was Jim Lehrer the go to moderator?  Seems like there were panelists in addition to the mod in 1992.SaveSave

[simpsongal]

Sept 2, 2016 11:49:29 GMT -5 BlondeSpiders said:

I wonder if the choice of Chris Wallace was to mollify Trump. He's not the most "fair and balanced" guy out there, and his unequivocal support of Roger Ailes makes me question any semblance of impartiality.

maybe but trump doesn't have the best relationship with Fox News right? I recall Wallace asking surprisiningly probing questions during the gop debates.

[pretzel]

I WANTED MEGAN KELLY!!!!

[chchchia]

I love Lester holt and if I had another choice it would be David muir just bc I love him too..I just could watch the both of them no matter what they are doing though.

[boxertdog]

Sept 2, 2016 19:53:54 GMT -5 pretzel said:

I WANTED MEGAN KELLY!!!!

Martha Raddatz is a badass. We're good.

[WanderingWinoZ]

talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/now-that-you-mention-it--2

t's a bit ironic, given where we are now. But I think this point from TPM Reader PS at least deserves some discussion. It seems pretty clear that the word came down from Murdoch during that first debate that the moderators should rough Trump up - not because he was the emerging frontrunner and needed scrutiny but because he wasn't the Fox-preferred candidate. As I predicted that evening, it was quite likely to backfire. And it did. But that's at least problematic for someone lined up to host one of the presidential debates.

The most important thing in Gabriel Sherman's article about Roger Ailes, by far is actually not one of the five points listed by Katharine Krueger in her recent piece. (Does the American public really need to care that Ailes’s wife is about to leave him?)
The most newsworthy thing—and a genuinely astonishing finding—is that the moderator of the third scheduled presidential debate has already ‘thrown’ the questions for a televised debate at least once at the insistence of Rupert Murdoch, conveyed by Ailes, specifically in order to politically harm Murdoch’s least preferred candidate, Donald Trump.


Please, please point out to your readers how insanely inappropriate and unjournalistic this behavior is—‘hammering’ a candidate, in the Fox News source’s words, at the dictation of his boss, for political purposes—and how completely it disqualifies Chris Wallace from moderating further debates.
This deserves to be an absolutely enormous issue, now that it has been reported openly.

It means that Wallace will be unusually hard on Trump, to try to overcome the accusation of misconduct in his previous outing; or unusually hard on Clinton, for ‘balance’; or unusually hard on Clinton, simply because he is a conservative used to following instructions from a conservative mogul.

None of these possibilities is tolerable for the debates, or for deliberative democracy. Chris Wallace should be disqualified immediately, now that Gabriel Sherman has reported on this jaw-dropping misconduct in the first Republican primary debate.