European Reaction to ABC Debate on April 16

"readers had left more than 12,300 comments on the ABC News website, most of them attacking the programme."

US network faces backlash after Democratic debate

The Guardian - London
April 17, 2008
David Nasaw

American television network ABC was accused of bias and triviality today in the wake of the latest debate between Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

American television viewers and media commentators lashed out at the network, decrying the format of the debate, which they complained amounted to a venue for the candidates to reiterate political attacks rather than delve into substantive policy disagreements.

The network was also criticised for a perceived slant against Illinois senator Barack Obama, particularly because moderator George Stephanopoulos worked in President Bill Clinton's White House as an adviser and aide.

By mid-morning today, readers had left more than 12,300 comments on the ABC News website, most of them attacking the programme.

"This debate should have been shown on E! or MTV," wrote one viewer named Dave_Gee.

"ABC was the obvious loser of last night's debate," wrote another, dubbed SFG07. "How shameful to operate from the gutter when there's so many important policy issues that could have been addressed. Your news team was appalling."

The network was lambasted for Stephanopoulos and co-moderator Charlie Gibson's focus for virtually the first half of the program on Obama's recent missteps and his association with his former pastor Jeremiah Wright.

After brief opening statements and a question about vice-presidential picks, Gibson leapt at Obama on comments he made at a San Francisco fundraiser earlier this month.

Obama described denizens of economically depressed small towns as "bitter" voters who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations".

His rival, Senator Hillary Clinton, had spent the past several days attacking him on the remarks and seeking to portray Obama as an elitist and out of touch. In raising the remarks, Gibson was seen last night as creating an opening for Clinton once again to attack Obama. She obliged.

Gibson then raised the Illinois senator's relationship with Wright, whose incendiary remarks on race relations in the US were seen by many as anti-American.

Obama has distanced himself from the Chicago preacher, and largely defused the matter with a well-received speech in Philadelphia last month.

A spokesman for media monitoring organisation Media Matters said the network missed an opportunity to "offer the American people a frank discussion of the issues that we all face and how these candidates plan on tackling them.

"Instead, those that tuned in saw a veteran news team clearly out of touch and more interested, frankly, in gaffes and gotchas than health care, the war in Iraq, and our failing economy," said the spokesman, Karl Frisch.

"For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news," Washington Post television critic Tom Shales wrote this morning.

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