Every four years, the two parties and news media collude in this PR spectacle. It's time for citizens to reclaim control from party apparatchiks.

David Bollier, OnTheCommons.org

Have you wondered why the presidential debates don't present any serious ideas or encourage any substantive exchanges about policy and political philosophy? Have you noticed that the events resemble a whirring jukebox of familiar sound bites -- a highly produced, tightly scripted affair with with no surprises and little passion?

There's a reason. Both candidates and their political parties want it this way. The debates are not the production of some independent third party like the League of Women Voters, the host university or news organizations. They are co-produced by the Democratic and Republican Parties themselves, who have ingeniously disguised their actual roles by nominally delegating control to the Commission on Presidential Debates.

The Commission sounds like some venerable group of eminent graybeards and experts. Not so. It is a group of party apparatchiks whose express goal is to broker the terms of the debate in order to advance and protect each candidate's interests. For the 2008 debates, the Commission negotiated a 31-page memo of understanding that lays out in precise detail the rules of stagecraft, questioning, follow-up, audience deportment, and other conditions. The contents of this memo, however, have not been disclosed despite requests by citizen groups.

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Related:

Fantasy Brokaw, Liz Cox Barrett, Columbia Journalism Review
Why would any journalist show up to "moderate" a debate so fraught with rules? There is next-to-nothing journalistic about it, from the prohibitions on follow-up questions to the entirely absurd restriction on questioner reaction shots.