Originally Posted by
tehdang
I cited the first few problems I had in other posts, and the choice of moderators and presentation of topics are typical of the age cohort deciding upon them. Some of the debates felt like rehashes of the major topics of the 80s and 90s. I've assigned blame, and you're free to defend boomers styling the debates. You don't have to admit it, but that's your choice.
Presidential debates prior to voting is bad faith in your eyes. Okay dokey.
I'm not opposed to you deciding to argue that voters choose to vote without the benefit of being able to choose to view the debate, but if you could stop smothering it with "and it's bad faith to argue otherwise," then maybe I think you actually believe your argument. The more you smother anyone arguing otherwise with accusations of bad faith, the more I think it's because you weakly believe otherwise, or are ashamed to admit doubts in your own arguments.
This is your attempt two or three to defend the status quo without being seen to defend the status quo. If only organizations of old, white, and predominantly men had people like you to be their champion everywhere.
Moderator job, moderator job, moderator job, oh now they're fact checker debate participant instead of moderator. Your problem is with moderators moving above their station. They cease to moderate the conversation, but to actively participate in debating what points are valid. Obviously, I'm very much opposed to that, despite all this whining about how it's bad faith to dare question it.
Moderators can't be a neutral party when they're asked to interject into arguments that it's the debate opponent's job to make. They even have a hard time just letting people finish sentences as time expires without being seen to favor one or another.
Right back at you. But seeing as how the 'you're bad faith, no you're bad faith--you don't understand the concept of a debate, no you don't understand the concept of a debate' maybe we best leave it here.
I'm giving you an example of some actual argument regarding age. If you'd like to make it. I don't know. The "but GOP old" isn't an actual argument.
All the candidates of both parties are too old, and I favor term limits. I wouldn't hold up Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer as examples of the Democrats showing Republican candidates are too old! I'll start at the commission having no clue about the internet era, modern topics of debate, and who to moderate, and I seek their irrelevance. Then we can see if the current class of politicians can be challenged by term limits making them time out of national elected public office before having served 36 years in it.
Debate quality is how long it goes before trolls start leveling the racist/homophobic accusations. All your political beliefs are authoritarian racist/homophobic, hogum economics shown to never actually work, now help me get moderators the hall monitor debates as they ought. Uhh ... the bias and misrepresentation is so endemic now that I wouldn't trust you to moderate a debate for local dog catcher.
I like when they get fact checked in real time. That's the job of live social media outlets. They debate the person opposite with only time controls and subject guardrails and that generates any claims that some journalist thinks are misleading, dead wrong, or missing context ... and then those fact checks get fact checked too.
It's kind of the nature of the divide in America. Left can't allow the right to actually seek the betterment of the nation for the future, and right can't allow left to do the same.
I agree with you in part, and disagree with you in part. I do think the majorities just tune in to what politicians are saying right before an election, and in times of war or inflation/energy costs/recession. They also seek fact checks and neutral sources the fact check bases itself on to settle contentious issues during the debate. The old saying goes, "How can you tell a politician is lying? If their lips are moving." Americans do not give their politicians abundant presumption of truth-telling, but the kicker is, they also don't give journalists and fact-checkers the presumption that they're neutral and won't selectively quote facts and omit others to serve their own stated and unstated agendas. As journalistic institutions recruited more from graduates of elite colleges instead of working-class people who smoked too much and drank coffee like addicts, their implicit biases grew to mimic the cohort staffing their offices. Later, alternative media overcorrected for the problem by explicitly adopting biased viewpoints counter to the mainstream thought that preceded them. I do view politicians lying as a first-order problem as old as time itself. The class purporting to hold them to account, but many times serving to defend and protect them for political ends, is a second order problem that's now very widely understood. And people that think neutral fact-checkers stand above it all, and would solve the problems if their diagnoses and argument from facts was force-fed to debate viewers, are dangerously naive.