| The Main Stream Media (MSM) declared Mike Pence, the Republican, the winner of the Vice-Presidential debate immediately following it on Tuesday. They argued that Pence was the winner because he didn’t interrupt, seemed unflappable, and generally presented himself in more “Presidential” manner than Tim Kaine. Some observers found this judgement to be so bizarre, they attributed it to simple MSM bias in favor of Republicans. In spite of this rush to judgement by most of the MSM, a few pundits noted that Pence (1) threw Donald Trump under the bus when he failed to defend Trump’s many lies; (2) contradicted Trump’s Syrian strategy, and (3) distanced himself from Trump by telling numerous lies. |
| The MSM rushed to declare Pence the winner of this debate despite his failure to uphold any of the usual standards for judging a Vice-President’s performance. The outright weirdness of the MSM’s assessment of Pence’s was so evident that within 24 hours some members of the MSM had developed two theories to explain this assessment of their more impetuous colleagues. The first theory propounded by these apostate pundits was that the amount of time needed to fact check the Vice Presidential candidate statements made during the debate precluded any assessment of candidate performance that was based on lies. Of course, many of the lies with which Pence blanketed the debate were nullifications of statements Trump has been making for over a year. The only “fact checking” needed was consciousness. If, however, some mysterious brew of fact checking was needed, why could the MSM simply delay declaring a winner? The second theory proposed by the dissenting pundits was that since the first Presidential debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960, the media has used presentation to determine the winner. According to them, the basis for separating the presentational from the substantive style was Kennedy’s tanned and handsome versus Nixon’s sallow and unshaven appearance resulted in Kennedy being judged the winner by TV viewers, but not radio listeners. This theory is under mined by the fact that both Kennedy and Nixon were both substantive; appearance did not overwhelm substance. In effect, both of these explanations obscure the inability to recognize what is clearly the role of the Vice-President during the debate: to defend the nominee of his party and attack the other party’s nominee. Pence simply did not defend Trump and attack Hillary; Kaine attacked Trump and defended Hillary. Why did the MSM attempt to manipulate the outcome of the debate? Cynically, one could argue that the MSM was attempting to tighten the race and thus help ensure that an interested audience. Alternative, and more benignly, one could argue that the media is trying to uphold their bona fides as an unbiased source of information. After the first Clinton and Trump debate, the MSM was forced to report on how Hillary had destroyed Trump. Following the Vice-Presidential debate the MSM wanted to say something positive about the Pence. Ignoring the truth was simply collateral damage in achieving this end. Fortunately, the dissent of a few pundits led to an overthrow of the MSM’s initial narrative about the outcome of the debate. |