Grate Debate

by digby

I missed the debate tonight and forgot to set my DVR, but from a cursory look around the blogosphere, it must have been quite the media atrocity. Anyone who reads this blog will know that it doesn’t come as a surprise to me. The MSM are obsessed with trivial “character” questions to the exclusion of almost everything else. It’s like a weird form of Tourette’s Syndrome. They can’t control it.

From what I gather, the two ABC gasbags turned pretty heavily on Senator Obama tonight (although it sounds like they hit Clinton with the stupid too.) But it’s foolish to focus only on them. Regardless of who gets picked to pieces, with only a couple of exceptions, the debates and the debate coverage have been simply awful through the whole season. The ones Chris Matthews hosted were nearly unintelligible and the total inanity of Tim Russert in the October 30th MSNBC debate set the bar for nonsensical gotcha questions extremely high. Apparently Gibson and Stephanopolous leaped over it tonight like a couple of drunken gazelles.

The political media are a broken institution. Hopeless.

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