Candidates, mostly Republican, skip debates, bar press during midterm campaigns https://dailymontanan.com/2022/09/0...p-debates-bar-press-during-midterm-campaigns/ WASHINGTON — With two months left of the 2022 campaign season, a majority of Republican candidates are continuing to skirt away from not only talking to local and national media outlets about their policy issues, but their own constituents, leaving voters with little information on their policy positions. “If we are to hold our elected officials accountable on their policy stance(s), we have to know what they are,” said Nicholas Valentino, a political science and research professor in the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan. The relationship between the press and politicians has always had some amount of contention, throughout Republican and Democratic-controlled congressional terms and White House administrations. The Obama administration more than any White House administration used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who leaked to the press. For example, the government has used that act 11 times to go after federal workers who shared classified information with the press, and the Obama administration alone used the act seven of those times. But the refusal to talk to journalists and barring them from covering political events that would inform voters of their policy positions, has gotten worse over the years, and it’s showing up in local elections. “If you can undermine the credibility of the press, then you can also absolve yourself the responsibility to speak to the press, and we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the United States in that kind of behavior,” Valentino said. He said it’s a trend that worries experts who study democratic stability not only in the United States, but across the world. “One of the key indicators of democratic backsliding is our restriction of information to the free press and an unwillingness to speak to the press,” Valentino said. Debates are off the table, too It’s not just the media that Republican candidates are opting out of speaking to, it’s their own constituents. In Iowa, Republicans such as Gov. Kim Reynolds, U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley and U.S. Reps. Randy Feenstra, Ashley Hinson and Mariannette Miller-Meeks skipped an Iowa State Fair tradition – the Des Moines Register Political Soapbox where candidates talk to the public about where they stand on the issues. The only Republicans who spoke were those challenging Democratic incumbents. A majority of Republican candidates are also refusing to debate their Democratic opponents. Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine refused to debate Republican challengers in the primary and now has said he will not debate his Democratic challenger, former Dayton mayor Nan Whaley. In Nebraska, GOP governor candidate Jim Pillen also refuses to debate his Democratic challenger, State Sen. Carol Blood. If elected, Pillen would become Nebraska’s first governor since at least the 1970s to be elected without facing his opponents on a debate stage. (Nebraska U.S. Rep. Don Bacon, on the other hand, will participate in two debates and recently tweeted “I love debates.”) And in a closely watched Georgia U.S. Senate race, Republican candidate Herschel Walker has yet to hold a public debate with Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, who became Georgia’s first Black U.S. senator after a special election in January of last year. Walker has challenged Warnock to several debates, which Warnock agreed to, but Walker has backed out of those debates. Walker has agreed to an Oct. 14 debate hosted by Nexstar Media Group. Warnock has not agreed to the debate, and refused to answer the question when asked by a reporter from the Ledger-Enquirer. Warnock’s campaign responded to States Newsroom, but did not answer if he would attend the Oct. 14 debate. “How can we expect Herschel Walker to stand up for Georgians in the Senate if he refuses to debate on stage?” Warnock wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. Walker has also frequently put restrictions on local press, opting to release statements to conservative outlets like Fox News instead. Not all Republican candidates are declining debate invitations. For instance, Republican Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, who is running for governor, has agreed to debate Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly. Schmidt, however, waited three months after announcing his running mate before holding his first press conference. And a few Democratic candidates have been criticized for turning down invitations. In Pennsylvania, Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman has largely stayed away from interviews and accepting debate invitations for weeks following a stroke in May. His campaign has largely run on memes, attacking his GOP U.S. Senate nominee Mehmet Oz for being a New Jersey resident. Oz has agreed to attend what would be the first televised debate for the race, hosted by Pittsburgh’s KDKA-TV, on Sept. 6. And in Maryland, Democratic candidate Wes Moore and Republican candidate Dan Cox were invited to a Sept. 27 gubernatorial forum by Morgan State University’s student-run news publication. Cox accepted, but Moore declined, with his spokesman saying Moore did not want to “elevate the dangerous views” of his challenger. The rise of partisanship voting When political candidates refuse to step on the debate stage to either defend or explain their policy position, it makes it difficult for voters to be informed on what their representatives are doing, Valentino said. “One of the major discoveries in political psychology over the last 50 or 60 years, which is that in fact, it is highly rare and difficult for constituencies to hold their elected officials accountable,” he said. And when voters don’t have a clear idea of policy values a candidate holds, then their votes become more partisan, said Daniel Hopkins, a political science professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. “Voters, when they go to the polls, have a lot of information about national politics, and very little information about state and local politics,” he said. “There have been a whole set of very compelling studies in recent years, showing that when local newspapers go out of business, voters then tend to vote in more partisan ways.” Voting based on party affiliation alone, is also a shift away from American democratic norms, Hopkins added. “The reason that we ask voters to vote on all of these specific candidates, rather than just voting for a party, is because of the idea that the candidate matters, that candidates can take different positions, that these individuals are not just functionaries of their parties,” he said. “And so if voters are increasingly just joining the party line, that does pose a real tension with the way that we conduct our elections, which asks people to develop opinions about so many different political actors.” And refusing to allow press into political rallies, also makes it difficult to inform voters, Hopkins added. “They have less information, and so they’re going to stick with their partisanship,” Hopkins said. Attacks on the press as strategy Over the last several years, Hopkins said polarization has increased and certain Republican candidates have been “abandoning the idea that the news media can be a neutral outlet.” He pointed to former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose frequent attacks on the media helped him build a right-wing following ahead of the 2012 presidential primaries. He lost the Republican presidential primary, but the norm of attacking the press as a biased institution, was quickly followed as a tactic for former Republican President Donald Trump. The Trump administration also frequently attacked media outlets and barred them from press briefings and threatened to take away their White House press credentials. And in 2017, Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs was physically assaulted by U.S. House Montana-at large Republican candidate Greg Gianforte, while asking him a question about health care. Gianforte won the special election and is currently the governor of Montana. The Republican National Committee this year voted unanimously to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates ahead of the 2024 presidential election, arguing that it would not be a fair debate. The commission is a nonpartisan organization that has sponsored president and vice president debates since the ’80s and has Republican and Democratic membership. “The Commission on Presidential Debates is biased and has refused to enact simple and common sense reforms to help ensure fair debates including hosting debates before voting begins and selecting moderators who have never worked for candidates on the debate stage,” RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel said in a statement. And in Florida, GOP elected officials only allowed conservative media outlets to attend Sunshine Summit, an event where Republicans in the state discuss their political agendas. Gov. Ron DeSantis’ press secretary, taunted non-conservative media outlets on Twitter who were barred from the event. “It has come to my attention that some liberal media activists are mad because they aren’t allowed into #SunshineSummit this weekend,” she wrote. “My message to them is to try crying about it. Then go to kickboxing and have a margarita. And write the same hit piece you were gonna write anyway.” Republican Alaskan candidate Sarah Palin also avoided talking to the press during the special election to finish the term of the state’s only member of Congress, Rep. Don Young, who died in March. However, Palin did answer a survey response by the Alaskan Beacon about her various policy stances such as abortion (she doesn’t believe in codifying Roe. v. Wade), the validity of the 2020 presidential election (she believes the falsehood that former President Donald Trump won the election) and marijuana legalization (she believes it should be legal), among other issues. She lost against Democratic candidate Mary Peltola after rank choice votes were announced Wednesday night. Peltola will become the first woman to represent Alaska in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the first Alaska Native ever to serve in Congress. But shutting the press out isn’t the only concern that a democratic country is backsliding, Valentino said. The passage of strict voting laws – a trend among Republican state-controlled legislatures since the 2020 presidential election – and the denying of valid elections are some of the more egregious trends of eroding democracy. Many 2020 election deniers have been nominated as GOP candidates for governor in four critical swing states – Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Valentino said if election deniers started overturning elections, “that would ironically be one of the first major indications of election fraud occurring on behalf of the party that’s been accusing the other side of election fraud for years now.” “That in some ways, most scholars would say, is far more serious than attacks on the press, because it would mean that you were actually taking votes that had been cast, and throwing them out,” he said.
>>Reply to your posted article in inline, below. Article formatting has been changed to facilitate my response: QUOTE="gwb-trading, post: 5673437, member: 9113"]Candidates, mostly Republican, skip debates, bar press during midterm campaigns https://dailymontanan.com/2022/09/0...p-debates-bar-press-during-midterm-campaigns/ >>As the failing Republican Party continues its decent into irrelevance, self-destructive behavior is to be expected. Yes, I can understand the reluctance of Republicans talking to a biased media only to have their statements taken out of context, including attempts by most media to negatively reframe the Republican’s stated agenda. However, relative mental agility between political opponents is a fundamental consideration when voters are presented with a choice for, hopefully, representation. Further, there are pockets of less biased, if not actually friendly media for Repubicans to use as a sounding board. I believe a politician should use every opportunity they can get, even if it is in a “Unfriendly” venue to get their message out. Remember, any politician who has been legitimately “Wronged” by the media can always interject a brief statement, hopefully cleverly, before answering the question at hand. Remember Trump? He rode negative press coverage all the way to the Presidency in 2016. >>In most cases, I personally would summarily disqualify a political candidate from consideration if they refused to debate the issues with their opponent. In other words, by Republicans choosing to not debate, they may have already lost the battle without a shot being fired, allowing corrupted media to be credited with fulfilling its dark, anti-democracy purpose without a fight. WASHINGTON — With two months left of the 2022 campaign season, a majority of Republican candidates are continuing to skirt away from not only talking to local and national media outlets about their policy issues, but their own constituents, leaving voters with little information on their policy positions. >>Sounds like the Republican’s are trying to “Spite the media, only to cut off their constituent’s noses”? “If we are to hold our elected officials accountable on their policy stance(s), we have to know what they are,” said Nicholas Valentino, a political science and research professor in the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan. >>By the same token, if biased media misrepresents what politicians say, how can it be said the public ever really knows what the candidate’s agenda is? How is informed consent by the Governed ever achieved if material media deception exists? How can voters ever trust the results of elections, the importance of a particular vaccine, or the necessity of a military action if our media is not trusted? The relationship between the press and politicians has always had some amount of contention, throughout Republican and Democratic-controlled congressional terms and White House administrations. The Obama administration more than any White House administration used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who leaked to the press. For example, the government has used that act 11 times to go after federal workers who shared classified information with the press, and the Obama administration alone used the act seven of those times. But the refusal to talk to journalists and barring them from covering political events that would inform voters of their policy positions, has gotten worse over the years, and it’s showing up in local elections. “If you can undermine the credibility of the press, then you can also absolve yourself the responsibility to speak to the press, and we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the United States in that kind of behavior,” Valentino said. >>The credibility of the press has been undermined by special interests, including Global corporate advertisers, the lack of reporter and news organization accountability, and a general societal decline in ethics. The harmed parties due to media’s lost credibility are “Honest” politicians, the constituents, and our Democracy. Eventually, even our vaulted economic engine will stall as productivity declines due to people feeling not represented or a willing participant in system that seems exploitive to them, effectively harming even the special interests. He said it’s a trend that worries experts who study democratic stability not only in the United States, but across the world. “One of the key indicators of democratic backsliding is our restriction of information to the free press and an unwillingness to speak to the press,” Valentino said. >>After seeing multiple “Trials by media” for someone making a “non-woke” statement, is it any wonder why people with something to lose become reluctant to talk with the media? Debates are off the table, too It’s not just the media that Republican candidates are opting out of speaking to, it’s their own constituents. In Iowa, Republicans such as Gov. Kim Reynolds, U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley and U.S. Reps. Randy Feenstra, Ashley Hinson and Mariannette Miller-Meeks skipped an Iowa State Fair tradition – the Des Moines Register Political Soapbox where candidates talk to the public about where they stand on the issues. The only Republicans who spoke were those challenging Democratic incumbents. >>In other words, Republicans are afraid to say something harmful in debates among themselves the Democrats and the media can and will use against them. This is understandable to a degree because an unbalanced media can minimize negative aspects of their favored candidate while using quotes by their non favorite candidate’s opponent to credibly magnify that candidate’s weaknesses. The answer, again, comes down to relative mental agility between candidates and between candidates and biased media. This is the reality of the world we live in. Adapt or die. Whatever resources the RNC has remaining, I would believe past experience with dealing with biased media that has been resolved successfully would be shared with members. Think of the RNC as a clearing house of the combined experience of its members. Then again, it would take an effective leader to effectively manage such a thing, hence the ongoing decline of Republicans, in part. >>“Let’s go Brandon” is a rememberable, deliberate misquote by a biased reporter who felt compelled to lie for Joe Biden when the crowd chanted “Fuck Joe Biden” at a NASCAR race. >>While the media will try to avoid telling direct, varifiable lies, the media will work the intangibles such as opinions and mischaracterizations. Our media will also use statistics in misleading ways as well as polls without fully disclosing methodologies employed. The media will also attempt to influence polls, as imperfect polls often are, by running a story beforehand and “Ordering” or creating a poll in support of the media’s agenda. Most “Fact checkers” were created by the media in an attempt to increase their credibility, judging by related ownership and control information, thus present a inherent conflict of interest and credibility gap. A majority of Republican candidates are also refusing to debate their Democratic opponents. Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine refused to debate Republican challengers in the primary and now has said he will not debate his Democratic challenger, former Dayton mayor Nan Whaley. In Nebraska, GOP governor candidate Jim Pillen also refuses to debate his Democratic challenger, State Sen. Carol Blood. If elected, Pillen would become Nebraska’s first governor since at least the 1970s to be elected without facing his opponents on a debate stage. (Nebraska U.S. Rep. Don Bacon, on the other hand, will participate in two debates and recently tweeted “I love debates.”) And in a closely watched Georgia U.S. Senate race, Republican candidate Herschel Walker has yet to hold a public debate with Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, who became Georgia’s first Black U.S. senator after a special election in January of last year. Walker has challenged Warnock to several debates, which Warnock agreed to, but Walker has backed out of those debates. Walker has agreed to an Oct. 14 debate hosted by Nexstar Media Group. Warnock has not agreed to the debate, and refused to answer the question when asked by a reporter from the Ledger-Enquirer. Warnock’s campaign responded to States Newsroom, but did not answer if he would attend the Oct. 14 debate. “How can we expect Herschel Walker to stand up for Georgians in the Senate if he refuses to debate on stage?” Warnock wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. Walker has also frequently put restrictions on local press, opting to release statements to conservative outlets like Fox News instead. >>Sounds pretty weak to me. Even Biden will take the microphone from time to time. Not all Republican candidates are declining debate invitations. For instance, Republican Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, who is running for governor, has agreed to debate Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly. Schmidt, however, waited three months after announcing his running mate before holding his first press conference. And a few Democratic candidates have been criticized for turning down invitations. In Pennsylvania, Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman has largely stayed away from interviews and accepting debate invitations for weeks following a stroke in May. His campaign has largely run on memes, attacking his GOP U.S. Senate nominee Mehmet Oz for being a New Jersey resident. Oz has agreed to attend what would be the first televised debate for the race, hosted by Pittsburgh’s KDKA-TV, on Sept. 6. And in Maryland, Democratic candidate Wes Moore and Republican candidate Dan Cox were invited to a Sept. 27 gubernatorial forum by Morgan State University’s student-run news publication. Cox accepted, but Moore declined, with his spokesman saying Moore did not want to “elevate the dangerous views” of his challenger. The rise of partisanship voting When political candidates refuse to step on the debate stage to either defend or explain their policy position, it makes it difficult for voters to be informed on what their representatives are doing, Valentino said. “One of the major discoveries in political psychology over the last 50 or 60 years, which is that in fact, it is highly rare and difficult for constituencies to hold their elected officials accountable,” he said. And when voters don’t have a clear idea of policy values a candidate holds, then their votes become more partisan, said Daniel Hopkins, a political science professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. “Voters, when they go to the polls, have a lot of information about national politics, and very little information about state and local politics,” he said. “There have been a whole set of very compelling studies in recent years, showing that when local newspapers go out of business, voters then tend to vote in more partisan ways.” Voting based on party affiliation alone, is also a shift away from American democratic norms, Hopkins added. “The reason that we ask voters to vote on all of these specific candidates, rather than just voting for a party, is because of the idea that the candidate matters, that candidates can take different positions, that these individuals are not just functionaries of their parties,” he said. “And so if voters are increasingly just joining the party line, that does pose a real tension with the way that we conduct our elections, which asks people to develop opinions about so many different political actors.” And refusing to allow press into political rallies, also makes it difficult to inform voters, Hopkins added. “They have less information, and so they’re going to stick with their partisanship,” Hopkins said. Attacks on the press as strategy >>Biased media is a serious, ongoing threat to Democracy. As such, it is a political issue that constituents are concerned about and wise politician’s address. Over the last several years, Hopkins said polarization has increased and certain Republican candidates have been “abandoning the idea that the news media can be a neutral outlet.” He pointed to former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose frequent attacks on the media helped him build a right-wing following ahead of the 2012 presidential primaries. He lost the Republican presidential primary, but the norm of attacking the press as a biased institution, was quickly followed as a tactic for former Republican President Donald Trump. The Trump administration also frequently attacked media outlets and barred them from press briefings and threatened to take away their White House press credentials. And in 2017, Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs was physically assaulted by U.S. House Montana-at large Republican candidate Greg Gianforte, while asking him a question about health care. Gianforte won the special election and is currently the governor of Montana. The Republican National Committee this year voted unanimously to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates ahead of the 2024 presidential election, arguing that it would not be a fair debate. The commission is a nonpartisan organization that has sponsored president and vice president debates since the ’80s and has Republican and Democratic membership. “The Commission on Presidential Debates is biased and has refused to enact simple and common sense reforms to help ensure fair debates including hosting debates before voting begins and selecting moderators who have never worked for candidates on the debate stage,” RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel said in a statement. And in Florida, GOP elected officials only allowed conservative media outlets to attend Sunshine Summit, an event where Republicans in the state discuss their political agendas. Gov. Ron DeSantis’ press secretary, taunted non-conservative media outlets on Twitter who were barred from the event. “It has come to my attention that some liberal media activists are mad because they aren’t allowed into #SunshineSummit this weekend,” she wrote. “My message to them is to try crying about it. Then go to kickboxing and have a margarita. And write the same hit piece you were gonna write anyway.” Republican Alaskan candidate Sarah Palin also avoided talking to the press during the special election to finish the term of the state’s only member of Congress, Rep. Don Young, who died in March. However, Palin did answer a survey response by the Alaskan Beacon about her various policy stances such as abortion (she doesn’t believe in codifying Roe. v. Wade), the validity of the 2020 presidential election (she believes the falsehood that former President Donald Trump won the election) and marijuana legalization (she believes it should be legal), among other issues. She lost against Democratic candidate Mary Peltola after rank choice votes were announced Wednesday night. Peltola will become the first woman to represent Alaska in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the first Alaska Native ever to serve in Congress. But shutting the press out isn’t the only concern that a democratic country is backsliding, Valentino said. The passage of strict voting laws – a trend among Republican state-controlled legislatures since the 2020 presidential election – and the denying of valid elections are some of the more egregious trends of eroding democracy. >>And here we go. The characterization by the author of this article that “Voting reform” is actually “The passage of strict voting laws” which is part of the reason US Democracy is declining. Some statements, like the one quoted immediately above, obligate an accounting of particulars before making a characterization. I present the preceeding as “Exhibit A” in the case against biased media. Many 2020 election deniers have been nominated as GOP candidates for governor in four critical swing states – Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. >>What is it about “Election transparency” that seems so important to voters and politicians who perceive harm caused by how the 2020 elections transpired? Valentino said if election deniers started overturning elections, “that would ironically be one of the first major indications of election fraud occurring on behalf of the party that’s been accusing the other side of election fraud for years now.” >>Can Democrats still honestly deny the harm to the confidence the public has in our elections caused by voting tabulation irregularities, lack of transparency, and the lack of accountability? “That in some ways, most scholars would say, is far more serious than attacks on the press, because it would mean that you were actually taking votes that had been cast, and throwing them out,” he said.[QUOTE >>Ah, an attempted appeal to authority: “Scholars” to close the author’s argument. Interestingly. no individual with impressive credentials was named. Did the author talk with some “Scholars”, but found none wanted to be quoted because of their reluctance to be in the media spotlight? Ironic thought, isn’t? >>Our media is dirty and Democracy is being harmed as a result. The lost of Democracy will also hurt those who are deliberately or accidentally contributing to its decline. Our media shines when they do their best to get the facts correct and let voters draw their own conclusions. In practice nowadays, just the opposite happens, it seems. Time for our media to clean it up. For pride’s sake, if nothing else.
You make some interesting points. However I would note the following. In regards to debates the U.S. has had an independent Presidential debate commission in place for decades. Similarly nearly state has similar debate commissions for top state-wide races. The Republicans are refusing to debate in events hosted by these commissions complaining they are "biased". Instead Republicans are demanding that the Democratic candidate debate in front of right-wing forums with extremist MAGA moderators with questions selected by the extreme right wing (e.g. imagine Marjorie Taylor Greene as your debate questioner and moderator). When the Democrats state they will not debate in front of these circus events then the Republicans cry that Democrats "refuse to debate" -- which is not true. The Democrats will be happy to debate in front of the traditional independent debate commission in the states that have been held for decades. In regards to media -- it is clear that many media outlets have become more biased over time -- swinging to the right and left -- because this is what sells and generates revenue. There are a small number of media firms left such as Reuters and AP which are highly factual and non-biased. However Republicans have reached the point where they view any media outlet which is not totally cheering on MAGA as completely biased. Even Fox News is not good enough for Trump and his supporters anymore. The top neutral highly-factual media outlets such as Reuters and AP are highly mocked by Trump & DeSantis and their cronies. For example, take a look at what DeSantis's press secretary, Christina Pushaw, has been saying about AP for simply directly reporting the facts. The demands of Republicans for all media outlets to toe their perception of reality and their refusal to debate in front of independent commissions --- is very reminiscent of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia... and a number of other dictatorial countries.
The Great Arizona Debate over whether we will have a gubernatorial debate continues, as the Citizens Clean Election Commission on Thursday rejected Katie Hobbs’ proposal to dodge a face-to-face match with Kari Lake. Hobbs now has seven days to change her mind or look like an absolute weakling – which (hint, Ms. Hobbs) is never a good look for someone who assures us she’s ready to run a state of more than seven million people. The commission was thrown into a tizzy on Friday when Hobbs rejected the idea of appearing side-by-side with Lake. Hobbs has made the political calculation that it’s better to take the hit for being a no-show than to be upstaged by an opponent who has spent her professional career in front of a camera. Refusing to debate plays into Lake's hands I see her point. Where Lake is charismatic and fully in command in front of a camera or a crowd, Hobbs comes across as shaky and uncomfortable. Lake can talk circles around Hobbs, who seems, at times, to have trouble directly answering questions.
Reply to your post is inline, below. I have changed the formatting of your post to facilitate my reply: QUOTE="gwb-trading, post: 5674000, member: 9113"]You make some interesting points. However I would note the following. In regards to debates the U.S. has had an independent Presidential debate commission in place for decades. Similarly nearly state has similar debate commissions for top state-wide races. The Republicans are refusing to debate in events hosted by these commissions complaining they are "biased". Instead Republicans are demanding that the Democratic candidate debate in front of right-wing forums with extremist MAGA moderators with questions selected by the extreme right wing (e.g. imagine Marjorie Taylor Greene as your debate questioner and moderator). When the Democrats state they will not debate in front of these circus events then the Republicans cry that Democrats "refuse to debate" -- which is not true. The Democrats will be happy to debate in front of the traditional independent debate commission in the states that have been held for decades. >>I have yet to see significant evidence to the contrary that most Republican politicians are stupid and easily manipulated. In marketing, selling your ideas, selling yourself, selling the organization you are associated with is a fundamental aspect of running for political office. To be successful, that is, to win, a candidate needs to overcome doubts in voters minds. In other words, overcoming specific objections to vague doubts. The only way to do this is to answer tough questions. Questions that involve integrity, values, and a politician’s agenda. Debates are the most effective way to compare political candidates in real time and how they interact with each other. In most cases, it would be correct for voters to summarily dismiss any political candidate who refuses to debate. >>Notably, There is a point, whether it is at a trial or a debate that juror or audience sympathy will swing to the party deemed unjustly persecuted, even if that party has a few warts in the case of unfair, biased questions. A skilled debater can effectively lower said point by using humor or even by skillfully pointing out the bias. Skill and determination can trump bias. >>Where the media displays a pattern of misrepresenting what members of a particular political party says, there should be protections in place involving civil and administrative law. Reporter careers and network licenses should be at risk for cases that involve numerous, serious deceptive acts. After all, media bias is an attempt to influence voting and is effectively the same as stealing an election through ballot harvesting or other form of voting fraud. As it is, there are laws against committing perjury in a courtroom and witness or juror tampering. Free and fair elections are fundamental to a Democracy where the people choose their representatives, not our media as proxies for special interests. In regards to media -- it is clear that many media outlets have become more biased over time -- swinging to the right and left -- because this is what sells and generates revenue. There are a small number of media firms left such as Reuters and AP which are highly factual and non-biased. >>Any media company that has advertisers or a single major funding source will avoid causing harm to that source of revenue. As such, there are no major corporate media outlets that could be fairly considered unbiased. However, our present system can work if rules are enforced to ensure media bias is minimized. Remedies not previously mentioned for harmed parties could include free air time as could be ordered by an media ethics board, for example. However Republicans have reached the point where they view any media outlet which is not totally cheering on MAGA as completely biased. Even Fox News is not good enough for Trump and his supporters anymore. The top neutral highly-factual media outlets such as Reuters and AP are highly mocked by Trump & DeSantis and their cronies. For example, take a look at what DeSantis's press secretary, Christina Pushaw, has been saying about AP for simply directly reporting the facts. >>AP is the abbreviation for Associated Press”. From the days when Snowden has active in the US, AP has been considered the propaganda outlet of the US Government where “News stories” are written by often unnamed authors and distributed to various news outlets for dissemination. It is quite apropos for you to praise AP, given the frequency of your posts and the nature of your content. Personally, I consider the Japan Times and Al Jazeera as being more respectful toward reporting standards of years past compared to US news outlets of today. >>As far as Republican complaints regarding the media, I will agree there have been times they have gone overboard. Not doing debates is the most egregious example. However, it seems likely they will be politically “Darwined out”, as they should be. The demands of Republicans for all media outlets to toe their perception of reality and their refusal to debate in front of independent commissions --- is very reminiscent of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia... and a number of other dictatorial countries.[/QUOTE >>Political correctness. Narratives. Characterizations. Fact checking. What do these terms mean to you? When associating these terms, what is the first word you think of? What did you feel when you read these terms just now? The US media is highly skilled at pushing the agenda of special interests, including large corporate advertisers, US Government policy, and media company political philosophy on to the masses. The media distorts reality and effectively denies voters from finding the political representation they seek. Need a reminder of direction of country, political leadership, and consumer confidence polls? >>Many voters, including Independents and Democrats, feel we are headed towards a Nazi Germany situation with mandates that threatened job security, for example. Note: I am not against all “Governance” through our media, as there are critical practical considerations. However, when the media preferences the interests of half the country to the exclusion of the other half, the line must be drawn. Gaslighting may be great for ratings, as may riots and a Civil war. In other words, are media efforts at obtaining short term rating boosts risks long term destruction of our Democracy and country? Remember, the risk of throwing mud on your political opponents and creating narratives is you begin to believe it and see the other side as the enemy, likely leading to the justification ever more dirty tricks, including Nazi-like dirty tricks. Are we in agreement the chain of events that leads us to repeating Nazi Germany must be broken? Can we agree that most Trump supporters are not Nazi sympathizers? I am a staunch Trump supporter and I have also participated in the Holocaust Studies, for example. >>To more directly answer your question, the way to deal with perceived extremism is to air it out in a debate format between legitimate, competent debaters of particular political philosophies. Appeals to “Higher authorities”, such as “Experts” from relevant fields should be reflective of a range of opinions on a subject, not a single expert whose opinion happens to coincide with a narrative of that news outlet. >>In conclusion, any person or entity that seeks to restrict the flow of accurate, unadulterated information in some way most often is hiding an agenda that if exposed would discredit that entity. Reasonable exceptions involves the Constitutional right against self-incrimination or legitimate national security issues. Republican refusals to debate seems like an effort to make a statement against, and to punish the media. The reality, in my opinion, is Republicans who refuse to debate are punishing themselves, possibly others, if their less than competent opponent gets elected that would not otherwise have been if the Republican said something publicly about it.
And another one... the GOP candidate, Schmitt will only agree to debate on the right-wing Nextstar programming network using conservative moderators with questions provided by his campaign. He will not debate in forums organized by the Missouri Press Association which has run the debates for decades in the state. GOP candidate Schmitt a no-show at Senate debate in Missouri https://apnews.com/article/2022-mid...-environment-a810ca90f75c1c3f4cfd7fae0f9f89b2 Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Trudy Busch Valentine called for compassion for immigrants, criticized the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade and pressed the need to address climate change during a candidate forum before a gathering of journalists on Friday — one notable for the absence of the race’s clear frontrunner. Valentine, a Democrat, spoke in Lake Ozark at the forum sponsored by the Missouri Press Association. She was joined by Constitution Party candidate Paul Venable and Libertarian Jonathan Dine, but not Republican Attorney General Eric Schmitt. Valentine, 65, is a philanthropist and a retired nurse. She’s also the daughter of August “Gussie” Busch Jr., the longtime chairman and CEO of Anheuser-Busch who built the family business into the world’s largest brewery. Gussie Busch died in 1989 and the brewery was sold to InBev in 2008. Schmitt has, in news releases, referred to Valentine as “the heiress” and made digs at her family’s wealth. Valentine didn’t back away from it Friday. “I grew up in a family that lived the American dream, and I am so grateful to my parents for so many reasons, but especially because they taught me that to whom much is given, much is expected,” Valentine said. “And that’s what my life has been about.” Valentine was a late entry into the Democratic primary but narrowly defeated Marine veteran Lucas Kunce last month. Her overriding message is a pledge to push aside partisanship and bring decency to the office. At Friday’s forum, Valentine criticized politicians who have “kicked this can down the road” on finding a solution to immigration issues. She noted that her family farm runs on solar energy and called climate change “one of the greatest threats facing our country and our world.” And she said the Supreme Court’s abortion decision was “based on politics, not the law of the land and what had been precedent for 50 years.” A question about the abortion issue caused a stumble. Valentine seemed uncertain when asked if she supported a federal bill creating a right to abortion, first saying she did, then later saying, “I don’t support any kind of legislation except the turning over of Roe. v. Wade.” It was apparently a slip of the tongue by Valentine, an abortion rights supporter. Valentine also appeared confused over a question about a pending Supreme Court case over whether state courts, when finding violations of the state constitutions, can order changes to federal elections and the once-a-decade redrawing of congressional districts. Asked her opinion on the issue, Valentine instead seemed to address voting access. “I think we need rules that are the same all over America regarding our ability to vote,” she said. “And I think that has to be a fair vote, and everyone that is eligible needs to vote.” Schmitt, Missouri’s 47-year-old attorney general, is the first major party candidate for U.S. Senate or governor to decline to participate in the press association’s candidate forums in two decades. In September 2000, then-Gov. Mel Carnahan, a Democrat, skipped the MPA’s U.S. Senate candidate forum in St. Louis. The forum went ahead as planned with Republican candidate John Ashcroft and two others. With Election Day a month-and-a-half away, many candidates for leading offices — often Republicans — are abandoning the time-honored tradition of debating. For some, it reduces the chance of an embarrassing moment. Others are simply snubbing a media ecosystem they find elitist and cast themselves in the mold of former President Donald Trump, who made a show of missing some primary debates during the 2016 campaign. Schmitt’s campaign did not directly address why he skipped the MPA debate, but said he agreed to a debate next month that would air statewide on TV stations owned by Nexstar Media Group, but Valentine has not. “Missourians deserve a televised, statewide, prime-time debate with the two major candidates on the same stage,” Rich Chrismer, a spokesperson for Schmitt, said in a statement. Recent history suggests Schmitt’s failure to appear at the MPA forum won’t matter much. Missouri, once a swing state, has moved decidedly Republican over the past two decades. Auditor Nicole Galloway is the only Democrat elected for statewide office. Schmitt’s win in the August primary eased the fears of party leaders who worried that a primary victory by former Gov. Eric Greitens could have opened the door for a Democratic win in November. Greitens was seeking a political comeback after resigning as governor amid a sex scandal and campaign finance investigations in 2018, just a year-and-a-half into his first term. As it turned out, Schmitt won easily. Greitens was a distant third. Schmitt got another break last month when independent candidate John Wood dropped out. Wood is a former U.S. attorney and a Republican. He had significant financial backing from retired Sen. John Danforth, who was critical of the vitriol among the GOP candidates, including Schmitt. Incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt announced last year that he would not seek a third term.
The end of the debate? Republicans draw the curtain on political theater It’s a time-honored tradition, but as the US midterms loom, many Republican candidates are ducking out of televised debates https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/18/the-end-of-the-debate-republicans-midterms
Another brave Republican runs away from a debate... Sen. Rand Paul does not show up to scheduled debate with Charles Booker in U.S. Senate race https://www.lex18.com/news/decison-...s-to-debate-charles-booker-in-u-s-senate-race