CNN Presidential Debate moderator: fast, not furious

CNN's solid political host John King was game to keep Monday night's Republican presidential debate moving, but speed and thoroughness don't  go together, especially in a discussion overflowing with seven candidates.

That meant the would-be GOP nominees got away with a fair amount of bobbing and weaving in one of their first mass debates. Mitt Romney wouldn't directly say whether he would raise the federal debt ceiling. Michele Bachmann punted on whether her anti-abortion stand would apply to victims of rape and incest. Ron Paul wouldn't say whether a 5-year-old illegal immigrant child should receive medical care at an emergency room. And Newt Gingrich backed what sounded like loyalty tests for Muslims who would want to enter his presidential administration, without any serious follow-up.

Whether it was the large size of the field or the desire to speed through many topics, the candidates mostly had it their own way Monday night at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire.

King can't carry all the responsibility for the lack of accountability in the two-hour debate. Even when the CNN host pushed for a little combativeness, the candidates wouldn't take the bait,  at least against each other.

Most noticeable for a lack of inter-party aggression was former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who declined to repeat his early challenge to Romney's Massachusetts healthcare plan. Pawlenty would only acknowledge that he compared Romney's plan, crafted when he was governor of Massachusetts, with President Obama's plan because Obama had said he modeled his legislation on the Massachusetts health law. On the weekend talk show circuit, Pawlenty had belittled "Obamney Care," since both the Massachusetts plan and the national healthcare reform require individuals to purchase insurance, a "mandate" vehemently opposed by most Republicans.

All the fire on Monday night remained on President Obama.

The next debate hosts might also want to rethink the notion of informal time limits. King tried to keep the discussion moving without a set limit. That meant he spent much of his time burbling "all right, all right, all right," under the GOP hopefuls as they went well past the parsimonious 30-second response time.

Better to bring back the red warning light for the next debate--and a more generous time limit.

CNN tried to lighten the serious subject matter with a "this or that" feature, as the cable outlet cut into, and away from, commercials. King asked the candidates about such lite preferences as Coke vs. Pepsi, thin crust vs. deep dish pizza, Johnny Cash vs. Elvis Presley and Blackberry vs. iPhone.

That produced little spark and less insight. If you're going to insist on bringing a pop culture or lite sensibility to the proceedings, at least challenge these pols. A few more challenging choices: LeBron James or Dirk Nowitzki? Bourbon or scotch? Craps or blackjack? Iowa or New Hampshire?

That last one would really make frontrunner Romney squirm.

--James Rainey

Twitter: latimesrainey

Photo: Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, left, talks to CNN's John King, as Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), right, joins in during the first New Hampshire Republican presidential debate at Saint Anselm College in Manchester. Credit: Jim Cole / Associated Press

 

Tracing the showbiz roots of James O'Keefe's NPR sting

The news media haven’t figured out what label to pin on James O’Keefe, the wily troublemaker whose hidden-camera sting could be the smoking gun that leads to a cutoff of further federal funding from NPR.

The press has resorted to all kinds of fanciful descriptions, dubbing O’Keefe a conservative activist, guerrilla documentarian, gonzo journalist, modern-day muckraker, independent filmmaker, citizen journalist, daredevil videographer and video sting impresario. Oh, and did we mention a sneaky little punk who cheats context to destroy careers?

Whatever you call him, he’s become the most controversial newsmaker in the land, having nabbed a top NPR fundraiser badmouthing the “tea party,” leading to the resignation of the public radio network’s chief executive. That undercover operation followed O’Keefe’s use of similar techniques to expose wrongdoing at the community group ACORN in a sting where he dressed as a pimp, accompanied by a young woman posing as one of his prostitutes.

O’Keefe, 26, has gone after liberal-oriented institutions but cites as a major influence the famed left-wing activist Saul Alinsky, saying he has adopted Alinsky’s strategy of making “the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” But perhaps O’Keefe’s biggest influences come from the la-la-liberal world of show business, especially the comedy playbook of Sacha Baron Cohen, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. One of O’Keefe’s partners in the NPR sting even went by the name of Simon Templar, which surely reveals a bit of showbiz inspiration, since Templar was the secret agent Roger Moore played in the ’60s TV series “The Saint,” a character, like O’Keefe, with a penchant for disguise.

Like O’Keefe, whose confederates in the NPR sting posed as members of a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organization, Cohen is a masterful provocateur. He made his name as a brash British comic on the TV series “Da Ali G Show,” where he posed as a gold-chain encrusted hip-hop dunce who goaded a variety of government officials and civic leaders into making all sorts of inappropriate remarks, terrified of appearing less than cool in front of such a cheeky hipster.

Prodded by some leading questioning on the show by Cohen, James Broadwater, a conservative Republican congressional candidate, was inspired to say that Jews would go to hell if they didn’t follow Christianity. After he was roundly criticized by various Jewish organizations, Broadwater demanded that the FCC exert more sway over “the liberal, anti-God media” and proclaimed himself a “proud friend of Israel.”

Cohen’s best-known character was Borat, a clueless, vaguely anti-Semitic visitor from Kazakhstan who ended up starring in “Borat,” a huge hit movie. In the film, Borat goaded boozy frat boys (playing themselves) into complaining that minorities ran America and persuaded the patrons of a redneck bar to happily croon “Throw the Jew Down the Well.”

Just as the Ali G and Borat characters were born out of the comic assumption that many people, especially in a famously decorous country like England, would feel obligated to play along with Cohen’s characters, no matter how clueless or bigoted, O’Keefe’s NPR sting was based on the expectation that an NPR fundraising executive, at lunch with two potential big-time donors from a Muslim Brotherhood-style organization, would indulge his guests by trashing the "tea party" and denying any Jewish influence over NPR coverage, noting that they “own newspapers obviously.”

Cohen’s victims, like O’Keefe’s, often claimed they were entrapped. But as Cohen told me several years ago, he simply created a character that would help expose people’s real behavior and beliefs, which is exactly what O’Keefe has attempted to do with his sting operations.

The whole art of pretending is a staple of modern political comedy. I doubt that O’Keefe would admit to watching Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” since conservatives view Stewart and Colbert as part of the despised liberal media, but both shows could have been a big influence on his theatrical escapades. When “The Daily Show” correspondents report a story, their segments are often set up as stings, as with a recent piece by Aasif Mandvi, who confronted the head of a Nevada union after he discovered, while interviewing men on a picket line, that the union was paying temporary workers nonunion wages to man a picket line demanding better pay from Wal-Mart.

Mandvi’s shock was almost certainly pure pretense, since “The Daily Show” clearly discovered the news long before they dispatched Mandvi to Nevada, but that sort of fiction is now built into the show’s comedy. The same goes for “The Colbert Report,” which casts Colbert as a Bill O’Reilly-style blowhard, allowing Colbert to satirize the way conservatives react to news of the day. You might also say that NPR was “Punk’d,” in memory of the Ashton Kutcher-hosted MTV series that used many of the same hidden-camera techniques seen in O’Keefe’s stings to play pranks on unsuspecting celebrities.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing in media circles over the ethics of O’Keefe’s work, with all sorts of old-school journalists dinging him for using deception to get his scoops. Even though the damage is already done, his NPR story has taken some lumps, most surprisingly by Glenn Beck’s website, the Blaze, which revealed that O’Keefe, as he has done before, took the NPR fundraiser’s remarks out of context, using deceptive editing.

But why has the mainstream media treated O’Keefe’s provocative pranks as major news stories? After all, when Ali G and Borat used almost exactly the same technique to embarrass people, it was treated as clever satire. It just goes to show, as Jon Stewart has often said, that there’s little difference between real news and fake news anymore.

 --Patrick Goldstein

Photo: James O'Keefe. Credit: Bill Haber / Associated Press

Photo: Stephen Colbert. Credit: Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

Keith Olbermann on Michele Bachmann: Was she speaking to an invisible camerman named Murray?

OK, I confess. I thought I was made of sterner stuff, but I'm starting to officially miss "Countdown With Keith Olbermann." Rachel Maddow is just fine. Lawrence O'Donnell has potential. And Chris Matthews, well, has he ever gone 20 seconds without interrupting a guest?

Since Olbermann signed off Friday night, I've been having withdrawal pangs, missing his hilarious "Oddball" segments, longing for his eloquent rants, pining for his wryly comic Friday readings of James Thurber. Even if I didn't always agree with his politics, I thought Olbermann was an amazingly compelling on-air presence. Often unpredictable, almost always crackling with a kind of neurotic electricity, he was the closest thing on TV to a real-life Aaron Sorkin character, with a love of language, a barbed sense of humor and a passionate, occasionally self-destructive commitment to causes and personal ideals that sometimes only he seemed to understand.

Even though he's gone from MSNBC, thanks to Twitter we can still get a condensed version of what's on Olbermann's mind. He was in rare form during Rep. Michele Bachmann's "tea party" truly "oddball" response to the president's State of the Union address Tuesday night, offering zinger after zinger about the fact that Bachmann inexplicably seemed to be staring off camera during her entire speech. In other words, even though Olbermann wasn't on TV, he was focused on the TV-ness of it all, as if he were dreaming up a "Larry Sanders Show" sketch as he was watching.

Here's a few of his best bits:

"MICHELE! Hey! Yoo-hoo! CONGRESSWOMAN! We're the ones in the MIDDLE."

"Did the Tea Party not spring either for a Camera Red Light or a combined camera-teleprompter? It costs $3 extry."

"Seriously, somebody at the Tea Party needs to run on the stage, grab her, and POINT TO WHERE THE CAMERA IS."

"I haven't seen anything like that since Alan Keyes' old TV show where he would look left and right, even though there was no audience."

"Tonight's Final Score: Obama 22 Ryan 1 Bachmann -11,746."

Think Olbermann should have scored the speech differently? See it for yourself below.

-- Patrick Goldstein

 

 

Photo: Keith Olbermann speaking to the Television Critics Association press tour at the Beverly Hilton in 2008.

Credit: Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images