I realize that I’m probably the only person among my peer group who watches/listens to The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer even on a semi-occasional basis. Basically, my radio is either tuned to KQED or KALX, or I’m listening to music via CD/iPod.
So that means if I happen to be listening to KQED between the hours of 3 and 4 pm, I catch part or all of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. On May 8, there was a ridiculous “debate” between Melanie Morgan of Move America Forward and Jon Soltz of VoteVets.org. Fortunately it was all captured on YouTube for posterity.
Soltz: When I was in Kosovo we had 40,000 troops protecting 200,000 Serbs, that’s 1 troop for every 5 civilian. In Iraq, you’ve got 120,000 troops for over 26 million Iraqis, adding 20,000 more is like spitting in the ocean. So it’s a little more complex than in or out. We need to get out of Iraq, but we need to do it with a diplomatic surge and that’s where President Bush has got to step up to the plate and he’s got to negotiate directly with Iran and Syria.
Woodruff: And Melanie Morgan, Move America Forward, what do you want to see happen in Iraq?
Morgan: I want to see victory and apparently the Democrats don’t. Because why would you possibly conceive of funding a war in six-month increments. I would like to see Congressman Rom Emmanuel explain that plan or whatever it is that he’s proposing along with Commander-in-Chief Nancy Pelosi, to our troops, directly, to their face. Tell them that they are failing, that they have a failed, miserable performance. I’d like to see Mr. Soltz say that to our troops as well. I don’t think that you would get that exact same opinion from them, nor from the millions of other Americans who wish for us to succeed to find a strategy that will work, to give it time to work, to be patient, and to win.
At the end of that “debate,” I was appalled to having heard national discourse having been lowered to such a level on the most serious news show in the country. Apparently I wasn’t the only one, as people wrote into The NewsHour‘s ombudsman to rightfully complain.
Linda Winslow, Executive Producer, responded this way:
Last night the NewsHour attempted to help our viewers understand why the members of Congress are having so much difficulty arriving at a decision regarding the way forward in Iraq. We believe the intensity of the pressure being exerted on Democrats and Republicans by the “wings” of their respective parties is having an impact on those who are looking for some sort of compromise position. We decided to let representatives of those wings explain their positions, hoping they would participate in a dialogue with us and each other. As our guests demonstrated, however, that was a forlorn hope and the result was a lot of heat, but very little light.
Since neither guest was in the studio with Judy Woodruff, there wasn’t much she could do to prevent them from interrupting one another, short of saying — as she did at least three times — “please let him/her finish his/her point”. The NewsHour style is to ask pointed questions politely; we expect our guests to subscribe to the same rules. Since the program is produced live, we can’t do much to eliminate rude guests from your television screen once the segment has begun; what we can do is guarantee you will never see that person on our program again.
[via Romenesko]
