Debate Drama

For me the central drama of the Democratic candidate debates is the conflict between candidates trying to address serious issues versus TV "journalists" asking simpleminded and irrelevant questions designed to create soundbites and basically to up their ratings with manufactured conflict.

To show even more clearly that these are engineered as shows, CNN--which ran last night's debate-- has been exposed as selecting questions posed from the audience as well as their own questioning which dominated the debate-- in one case, preventing a student from asking the serious question she wanted to ask, about nuclear waste storage, and insisting she ask Hillary Clinton whether she preferred diamonds or pearls.

This comes after a week of bushwah over the Clinton campaign suggesting to a student in Iowa that she ask Hillary a question about global warming. I am no fan of the main figures in the Clinton staff or how they operate. But all campaigns do this all of the time, and if it takes planting a question to get the Climate Crisis discussed, I'm for it.

What disgusts me is this bloodlust for ratings that goes through all kinds of contortions to turn the campaign into a prize fight, in the place of the kind of debate the nation and the world needs and deserves over the future.