Andrew Beaujon
Oct. 24, 2012
10:38 am
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Andrew Beaujon
Oct. 23, 2012
2:45 pm
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Andrew Beaujon
Oct. 23, 2012
10:44 am
As President Obama and Mitt Romney met for their third debate Monday, viewers and journalists settled into a slightly rote script. We sent funny tweets, then
compiled the best ones. The nation's
fact-checkers went to work, as did our
makers of memes. Twitter
collected data related to all these efforts.
Here's what journalists had to say about Bob Schieffer as moderator:
- Schieffer got good marks, even from the Media Research Center's Brent Bozell, whose Newsbusters.org had compiled a dossier on Schieffer in advance. "Schieffer managed to moderate this debate without revealing his own positions," AP TV writer David Bauder quotes Bozell as saying in a statement. "Well done." Schieffer "did a superb job of implementing the new format,” Commission on Presidential Debates executive director Janet Brown told Politico's Dylan Byers, who called Schieffer's performance "the gold standard."
- Schieffer had trouble keeping the candidates focused on foreign policy at times, and he had a small verbal goof (though he did not say "Obama bin Laden"). "If you’re a purist, maybe you like how Schieffer mostly avoided injecting himself into the proceedings," Jeff Bercovici writes in a negative review. "Unfortunately, the result of his reticence was another tedious, low-information debate." Tom Shales said Schieffer's question "What is America's role in the world" was "the dullest question of the night."
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Andrew Beaujon
Oct. 22, 2012
8:30 am
Tonight, President Barack Obama and GOP nominee Mitt Romney will meet for their third and final debate before the Nov. 6 election. Voters will assess their performance while journalists will also assess how
Bob Schieffer moderates their conversation. If recent history is any prediction, it will be a challenge.
There were 122 interruptions in the presidential debate on Oct. 16, 1.4 per minute on average. George Mason University's Center for Media and Public Affairs counted
the times Obama and Romney stepped on one another's sentences, and compared it to
their count from the first presidential debate. Some of the findings from a CMPA press release:
President Obama cut off Mr. Romney in mid-sentence 36 times, while Romney cut off Obama 28 times. Moderator Candy Crowley cut off Romney 23 times, compared to the 15 times she cut off Obama.
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Andrew Beaujon
Oct. 17, 2012
8:09 am
CNN |
Mediaite |
Reuters |
Associated Press |
Forbes
Candy Crowley told Soledad O'Brien about the two moments when Tuesday's debate audience clapped:
In both instances, after Crowley attempted some live fact-checking. From CNN's transcript:
Crowley: Well, I knew that the president has said act of terror, because this has kind of come up before, and also I heard him that day. And what Mitt Romney was going for, and I think where he tripped himself up was that he picked that one wrong fact. The president did call it or refer to it in some ways an act of terror, and so it felt as though - and the president kept looking at me going, you know, and I thought, well, I did know then, I said, you know, he did call it an act of terror. That's what caused the applause.
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Emma Axelrod
Oct. 17, 2012
6:07 am
I don’t like to be told there’s something I can’t do. To be specific, I don’t like to be told there’s something I can’t do because I’m a girl.
Whether they meant to or not, and I’d like to … Read more
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Andrew Beaujon
Oct. 16, 2012
11:19 am
On Monday, Mark Halperin published a
memorandum of understanding between the Obama and Romney campaigns on how the debates would be conducted. Both campaigns had expressed concern that Candy Crowley, who will moderate tonight's town-hall-style debate, might ask
follow-up questions.
USA Today's Martha T. Moore writes that Frank Fahrenkopf Jr., a co-chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates, told her "
the commission is not bound by the campaigns' agreement"; Crowley "will be able to ask follow-up questions during a two-minute 'discussion' period after each candidate has answered the question posed by a member of the audience," Moore writes.
"This (agreement) is between the campaigns,'' [Fahrenkopf] said Monday. "We haven't agreed to it and neither has Candy.'' Nor has the commission sent CNN a copy of the campaigns' agreement, called a memorandum of understanding, he said.
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Andrew Beaujon
Oct. 15, 2012
7:30 am
Time |
The New York Times
The Obama and Romney campaigns signed an agreement that at Tuesday's debate, "The moderator will not ask follow-up questions or comment on either the questions asked by the audience or the answers of the candidates during the debate or otherwise intervene in the debate except to acknowledge the questioners from the audience or enforce the time limits, and invite candidate comments during the two-minute response period.” Time
obtained the memo (embedded below), which lays out the terms for the town-hall-style debate agreed to by the campaigns and the Commission on Presidential Debates.
The moderator has a different idea. CNN's Candy Crowley told Suzanne Malveaux last week that moderators "
need to take control” at times.
In an
interview with The Huffington Post's Jack Mirkinson last week, Crowley said, "I think it's always best when these guys engage with each other, but that doesn't mean I won't engage with them if that gets us closer to what we need."
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Andrew Beaujon
Oct. 12, 2012
7:57 am
Who won Thursday night's debate: U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan? Vice President Joe Biden?
Moderator Martha Raddatz? The
furniture?
The country's chattering class may need all weekend to argue these points. But in terms of newspaper design, the Oshkosh (Wis.) Northwestern scored a decisive victory over the (Wilmington, Del.) News Journal. Wisconsin enjoys an unfair advantage in such competitions, with far more print outlets than tiny Delaware to choose from. But despite a snappy headline treatment, even the The Times-Tribune, the daily covering Biden's hometown of Scranton, Pa., can't compete with the Northwestern's use of negative space.
All front pages are courtesy
the Newseum.
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- The space between Ryan's and Biden's heads resembles an inverted Grecian urn in the Oshkosh Northwestern's instant classic front page.
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