The debate between the candidates for vice president — GOP nominee Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz — was dominated by Vance, and all but a handful of hardened partisan pundits agree on that conclusion.
Walz wobbled and panicked from the first question — which everyone in the world knew would be about Iran’s ballistic missile attack on Israel earlier in the day. Yet Walz still fumbled his response, and it got worse from there until the CBS moderators invoked the unwritten mercy rule for left-wing moderators watching the Democrat melt and tossed Walz some softballs on J6 at the debate’s close, by which time the internet was howling and laughing at the Minnesota governor.
There were three important takeaways:
First, Vance is a superb and calm debater and a reassuring figure on the national stage.
Second, Walz is not, and he represents the one big decision Vice President Kamala Harris has had to make since President Joe Biden dropped out. It was a terrible decision. Imagine her Cabinet and White House staff if somehow, she wins.
Third, legacy media is irretrievably broken and cannot be reclaimed from its lurch into rote leftism and extreme partisanship, or even pulled back to a minimum level of seriousness on big occasions.
Do executives at these networks — ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC— not see what has happened? Americans don’t trust the news divisions at the legacy networks. It’s as if those divisions are run by a combination of fresh-from-campus-demonstration interns and hardened partisans from the Obama years.
The CBS debate was not, however, as overtly biased against Vance as ABC’s earlier debate was against Trump, but it was still very, very biased against the center-right and conservative audience. Viewers saw the question set veer quickly from a world crisis and the border crisis to get to the left’s favorite issue of abortion.
With the world tuning in only hours after Iran launched 180 ballistic missiles at Israel, the moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan did open with an obligatory round of questions on that crisis. But, after 10 minutes, they plowed on to a quick exchange on immigration and the Biden-Harris massive fail on the relief efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene’s savaging of North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Virginia in order to get to … abortion, which had been discussed at length in the ABC debate and about which there are zero mysteries.
Three rounds of questions on abortion, really? And three rounds marked by the rote framing favored by the hard left? Predictable but still shocking.
The debate ended in a morass of childcare questions and then the obligatory ‘Wasn’t January 6th terrible?’ questions.
What a farce. Not one question on China’s vast military build-up and its threat against Taiwan and the Philippines. Not one question on the Chinese Communist Party spies shot through our country, including the office of New York’s current and past governor. Not one question on the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Yes, there was a quick dash through the consequences of more than 10 million illegal immigrants flowing across the southern border under the Biden-Harris regime, but also a quick cut-off when Vance began what was an obviously embarrassing factcheck of the CBS factcheck on the ‘legal status’ of the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio. ‘We have a lot to get to,’ was the trigger for cutting off anything uncomfortable.
Walz was asked about his lying about his trips to China — sort of. It was left hanging. A knuckleheaded answer for a knuckleheaded team of debate organizers. Chinese President Xi Jinping is a sort of Voldemort for the networks — never to be named — perhaps because ABC and CBS all have corporate ties to companies that must do business there?
Look, whatever votes were moved by the debate moved toward the GOP because Vance hammered that the costs of everything from food to gas skyrocketed under Biden-Harris, gave a quick tutorial on why construction costs have soared and thus the price of houses, and repeatedly reminded the audience of Harris’s failure in her job as ‘border czar,’ while also stressing the need for more domestic energy production. Tim Walz provided comic relief.
The loser wasn’t just Walz though. It was also CBS, which joined ABC in a legacy media hall of shame. When we get back to debates in four years, the good news is the ‘debate commission’ is already dead and that, by 2028, the idea of the big networks hosting debates unchecked by center-right moderators will be as well. The candidates will call on C-SPAN and find some fair moderators. Siri could have done a better job in our past two debates this year.
What has to be dawning in the C Suites of networks — if they are at all self-aware — is that their product and their talent are awful, and their audiences have already left or will soon leave. Tuesday night was just the most recent example of why.
Hugh Hewitt is host of ‘The Hugh Hewitt Show,’ heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.