By Andre Williams
The biggest irony of the first 2024 presidential debate is its format. For several years the press has called attention to the loss of articulate, clarifying, and civilized public language. Just about anyone with two cents to share about 21st century politics will talk about its reduction to ‘sound bytes’ and its resemblance to snappy kitchen magnets. This is an apt critique at the personal level, but it’s a rather strange one when public news outlets make it. Public media outlets choose to present news stories and opinion pieces in the very manner they end up critiquing them for. Their own formats produce the language they despise. Thursdat night’s debate was no exception. The format of the debate allowed each candidate two minutes to respond to a question, and each got a single minute to respond to their opponent’s response.
Theoretically, I imagine the umpires of this debate thought this format would allow the candidates to get through a lot of the urgent material that’s on the nation’s mind. In practice, this format allows one candidate to say something is true, the other to say that it isn’t, and then to bicker back-and-forth for the minutes remaining. The average viewer would need a supercomputer to verify the legitimacy of just about every sentence that made an appearance in the debate.
One candidate says that x thousand people died from x thing last year, and then a minute later the other will resurrect the x thousand and deny that anything ever happened. One person says that the price of x product has doubled, tripled, quadrupled, quintupled in the past year, and then the other will say that the price of that very product is lower than its ever been. Listening to them debate is a strange form of psychological warfare.
Affiliates of both the right and the left will likely say their respective political opponents had an embarrassing showing last night, but I think we should really assign the embarrassment to the logistical discretion of CNN. There is nothing that mandates this format of discourse, and yet it has become the golden standard of political debates in towns and cities everywhere. Thursday night’s debate was anything but clarifying, and the future debates will likely continue to be so.
Andre Williams is a former contributor and intern at the Lake County Record-Bee
