There have been 20 Democratic presidential debates, and each 90-minute debate has been preceeded and followed by hundreds of minutes of microscopic examination of every word and gesture by the candidates. It's like pre-game and post-game sports talk, only infinitely worse because athletes only get judged on their actions, not their words and facial expressions.
But for all the hours of debate punditry, one question is never asked: who gets to be a pundit?
The pundits have enormous power. Before the debates, they can decide which candidates to invite and which to exclude, like Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul. They can even arbitrarilyÂ(*)uninvite candidates, as they did to Dennis Kucinich in Nevada.
When the debate starts, they can ask any question they want, be as nasty and biased as they want, yet they never have to pay a price.
Last night, Tim Russert's attack on Barack Obama over Louis Farrakhan was especially egregious.
Here's Josh Marshall:

He launches into it, gets into a parsing issue over word choices, then tries to find reasons to read into the record some of Farrakhan's vilest quotes after Obama has just said he denounces all of them. Then he launches into a bizarre series of logical fallacies that had Obama needing to assure Jews that he didn't believe that Farrakhan "epitomizes greatness".
As a Jew and perhaps more importantly simply as a sentient being I found it disgusting. It was a nationwide, televised, MSM version of one of those noxious Obama smear emails.
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Digby rightly frames this as an even bigger issue:

The country wants change. They want Washington to stop all the partisan bickering and they want a different tone. They want their government to be serious and deal with real problems.
Can someone please explain to me how that can possibly happen until something is done about the reprehensible political press? From tax returns to Farrakhan to footage shown by "mistake" to the endless, trivial, gotcha bull(*)(*)(*)(*), this debate spectacle tonight was a classic demonstration of what people really hate about politics. It isn't actually the candidates who can at least on occasion be substantive and serious. The problem is Tim Russert and all his petty, shallow acolytes who spend all their time reading Drudge and breathlessly reporting every tabloid tidbit and sexy rumor and seeking out minor inconsistencies from years past in lieu of doing any real work.
Judging by their silly questions tonight, Russert and Williams obviously know nothing about health care policy, Iraq, Islamic terrorism, economics, global trade or any other subject that requires more than five minutes study to come up with some gotcha question or a stupid Jack Bauer fantasy. It's embarrassing.
These people guide the way citizens perceive politics even if the citizens don't know it. It's hard for me to see how anything can truly change until this is dealt with.
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Here's one way to deal with it: let's demand that NBC fire Tim Russert for his Farrakhan smear.


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