Skip to main content

What’s Wrong with the Presidential Debates – How to Fix Them

The fundamental problem is that there is a pretense of moderator neutrality while at least one side thinks the moderator is biased or incompetent. When there is a presumption of unfairness by the moderator whether caused by bias or incompetence, there is no stability with respect to the rules being observed. The person who feels disadvantaged will attempt to resolve the injustice inflicted on him by responding in self defense whether strictly following the rules or not. The other person will then be doing the same thing.

Chris Wallace was primarily responsible for the problems of the first presidential debate of the 2020 election. His questions were asked from the perspective of the Biden campaign rather than open ended. Chris Wallace often challenged President Trump, but rarely called out Biden for lies or evasions.

One problem is having a supposedly neutral moderator in the first place. It is unlikely both parties will trust a moderator to be neutral. The questions should be posed to the candidates by one another rather than by a moderator. Simply deciding the questions to ask will introduce bias. Also, there should be a timer similar to a chess timer linked to the microphones and cameras to give the two candidates equal time. When a candidate was finished speaking or reached a fixed time limit agreed to (day two or three minutes), he would turn the time over to the other candidate. The timer would be automatically triggered at the time limit. If one candidate ran out of time, then the other candidate would get his remaining time to finish talking and conclude the debate for up to 5 minutes or some other agreed limit.

This would allow the candidates to get equal time, ask relevant questions, and speak without interruption or the other candidate making faces while the other talks.

Eliminating the moderator would allow serious questions to be asked and candidates could be judged for the questions they asked as well as their answers. A moderator just gets in the way in pursuit of his own agenda rather than letting the public get a better understanding of the candidates.

There should also be a check of both candidates for communication devices to ensure neither candidate is cheating.

To keep the candidates honest, the debate commission web site should link to each of the campaign web sites. Those sites would show fact checking done by the campaigns disputing the other candidate and supporting their own candidate.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CPS Reform Proposal

CPS Reform Proposal Purpose: Improvement in accountability and cost effectiveness of CPS for the benefit of the public is the primary goal of this proposal. It seeks to allow this by privatizing the management of the CPS functions and allowing direct voter input for selecting the amount of services that will be provided by each contracting organization. By requiring voters to vote for percentages of business to go to each contractor, better contractor performance will result in more state business going to the superior contractors. By requiring each voter to vote for at least two contractors, we still ensure that other contractors will be in place to provide cost and quality competition. Time Frames: CPS will contract all routine case management work to 3-5 qualified independent organizations on a bi-annual basis corresponding to the election cycle for state legislators. Investigation work will also be contracted out to 3-5 qualified independent organizations on a bi-annual basis. ...
1 comment
Read more

Medical Regulation - A Prescription for Disaster

The medical industry is highly regulated by government at both the Federal and state level. The justification of the extensive regulations is to protect the public from abuse at the hands of bad doctors, pharmacists, and other medical providers as well as from drug companies selling dangerous drugs. There are cases when health industry regulators help people, prevent suffering, and save lives. However, there are also cases when people are hurt , forced to endure unnecessary suffering, and needlessly die because of regulators. Balancing the costs and benefits can sometimes be challenging, but government regulation almost certainly creates more costs in economic, human suffering, and human life. The primary reason for this is that regulators tend to be more risk averse than the average medical consumer (patient) and want to avoid blame for people being hurt by bad drugs or bad medical practitioners. They are also more interested in building bureaucratic empires than delivering value...
Post a Comment
Read more

I'm Back!

I took a break from political blogging because I was concerned that my Information Technology career would be adversely affected by my conservative and often politically incorrect views. Now that I'm retired, I'm back!
Post a Comment
Read more