Media critic scorches Matt Lauer: NBC let a ‘news reader’ host debate instead of a real journalist

[DonViejo]

Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik condemned NBC News over the weekend for allowing Matt Lauer to host a presidential forum instead assigning the task to a more seasoned political reporter.

At last week’s Commander-in-Chief Forum in New York City, Lauer spent over a third of his time with Clinton on her use of a private email server. But he then let Donald Trump off with softer questions, and even failed to fact check the claim that Trump had been against the war in Iraq from the beginning.

On Sunday’s edition of Reliable Sources, CNN contributor Tara Setmayer pointed out that Trump’s “tactic” of constantly lying meant that debate moderators would have to be ready to correct him for the sake of their audiences. “You never want the moderators to be the story,” she explained. “But it looks as though that’s going to be the case, and that could also be something that Donald Trump wants.”

Zurawik agreed that moderators had a responsibility to fact check “egregious” claims like Trump’s insistence that he had always been against the Iraq war. “You cannot let it pass,” Zurawik said. “And I think if you had someone with better journalistic chops sitting in that chair everything in their brain would have went, ‘Red alert, we have to correct this right now.'”

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http://www.rawstory.com/2016/09/media-critic-scorches-matt-lauer-nbc-let-a-news-reader-host-debate-instead-of-a-real-journalist/

[Zen Democrat]

1. I expect political journalists to know more than I know, and to demonstrate same to me.

Otherwise, they're all news readers. Any honest political junkie could do a better job than the current crop of pundits, who just don't seem to know enough to refute the lies and just leave them on the floor. These are not progressives. They are errand boys and girls, sent by grocery clerks, to make a buck off of you and me, with apologies to Col. Kurtz.