Regarding the recent Forum for Democrat Candidates, moderated by Keith Olberman, the format or process failed. They called it a forum, not a debate. However, it should have been a debate, which is a direct clash on the topics. That is difficult to do with a large number of participants. But possible. What we were given was quite simply snippets from the candidates’ self-adulatory, chest-thumping stump speeches. Clamorous and shrill cheer-leading. The audience in the context of a sports stadium couldn’t help but act more like an uncontainable mob of partisans than thoughtful, attentive, open-minded, serious citizen in a serious meeting, thanks mainly to the cheerleaders on stage.
But they were, after all, the Democratic party backbone from the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the blue collar and hard-hat, dust, smoke, grease, grime, sweat, and muscle of everyday construction and maintenance services of the infra- and supra-structure. I knew them from my working in the machine shop of the Studebaker Corporation, where I drilled and tapped oil pumps, or drove fork lifts and the Elwell Parker in the transportation department—they called me “college boy” (I wasn’t sure how to take that bit of stereotyping, friendly or distant)—and where I breathed the glue fumes in a furniture manufactory, or the printing ink and other chemicals of a printing plant. I knew them, too, as my fellow draftees in the army. The Democrats do not have a monolithic party; Jesse Jackson’s label of “rainbow coalition” fits. To achieve any consensus for each and every social and political issue in a two-party, majority-rule system, we Democrats have to travel further and work harder and longer than any Republican.
I was disappointed in Olberman’s performance. He is a brilliant journalist with the Democratic bias and a nearly impossible situation unlike his “show” on MSNBC. He did little creative with the difficult dimensions of the “forum” handed to him. I expected him to achieve more of a debate, keeping purely to one topic at a time, allowing no departure from the topic, insisting on a direct response to the question, eschewing “tiny” and frivolous topics and questions, successfully appealing to the audience for discipline, giving each candidate an opportunity to comment on each question, repeating the gist of each question to each candidate, and characterizing each comment as appropriate to the question asked and paraphrasing the response to the satisfaction of the respondent before proceeding to the next.
I do not believe that many journalists have not been schooled in requisite knowledge of spoken communication modes, such as debate. Journalist should not be the moderators of “formal” debates. They may have the substantive knowledge for it but not the procedural skills beyond question-asking. (But even there, having written an article on questioning behavior, I am dubious about journalists’ skills in questioning. In fact, many questions remain about their failure to question the President about his motives for starting a war.)
And who was chosen to provide summaries of the forum? Unbelievable! More grandstanding, hot-dogging self-aggrandizement by the campaign chairmen of the candidates.
There are debate specialists in our society who have been overlooked in favor of “journalists”, who themselves are headline-hogging, wannabe star entertainers and not the “conduits” they should be. The news as entertainment is the coming standard. Almost certainly the academics who know argumentation and debate are not entertaining enough for the media. There is still an empty niche to be filled with the evolution of a political maturity in the electorate displacing the politically infantile fascination with celebrity and stardom being gained by news people who are entertainers.
I enjoy Keith Olberman’s tv show. I was expecting more. He just could not resist the frivolity and irrelevancy in such as the Barry Bonds question.
