As Democrats and Republicans engaged in a fierce battle of spin and damage control in the wake of the first presidential debate, there was one area of general consensus: moderator Jim Lehrer was the big loser.

The veteran journalist, currently the executive editor of PBS Newshour, may have been hosting his twelfth such debate but he faced a blistering level of criticism for his performance.

Lehrer was accused of allowing the candidates to ride roughshod over the debate's rules, failing to enforce time limits that had been agreed upon beforehand and generally letting the entire discussion drift off topic and failing to impose himself on either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney.

"He didn't follow up. Today, moderators are expected to be aggressive: they're going to ask a question, they throw it out there, they don't just say a topic. They ask a question," said MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews.

Huffington Post writer Howard Fineman also slammed Lehrer. "Jim Lehrer was practically useless as the moderator," Fineman said on MSNBC.

On social media the poor reviews of Lehrer's performance were no better.

"Definitely Lehrer's last debate," said New York Review of Books political writer Michael Tomasky on his Twitter account.

"Regardless of who is winning this debate, Jim Lehrer is losing," said a tweet from ABC News analyst Dan Abrams.

Late-night comedian and major Democratic donor Bill Maher was typically blunt. "Lehrer sucked," he tweeted. Former New York Times editor Bill Keller went even further, referring to Lehrer as "roadkill" and giving his performance a D grade.

Conservatives also piled in, their criticism perhaps making it unlikely that Lehrer, 78, will ever be asked to moderate such a high-profile debate again. "Romney just ran right over Lehrer," tweeted conservative talk show host Dana Loesch. Fellow conservative media figure, Laura Ingraham, tweeted Lehrer was "a bit overwhelmed".

Attention focused on Lehrer's seeming inability to get the candidates to restrict themselves to the questions he asked and the broad nature of some of queries. When Lehrer tried to move on from the first segment, Romney cut him off by saying: "I get the last word of this segment."

Later in the debate Obama also shrugged off Lehrer's attempts to keep the candidates in line when he pointed out the president had used up his allotted two minutes. Obama snapped that he "… had five seconds before you interrupted me" and then proceeded to talk for at least another half a minute.

The delays in the debate got so bad that the final segment – meant to last fifteen minutes – only got three minutes. Nor was that just down to Obama and Romney embarking on long monologues. At one stage Lehrer himself took up a valuable 51 seconds to ask a single question.

But Lehrer was not entirely without defenders.

In a blogpost, Washington Post columnist Erik Wemple jumped his defence and said the tidal wave of criticism for his performance had been overblown.

"The debate was excellent — free-flowing, multi-topical, informative and civil," he wrote. He added that Lehrer's inability to enforce time limits had not been a problem in sparking an interesting exchange of ideas and points of view.

Wemple praised the candidates for their ideas and added: "Lehrer, though, deserves a nod as well. He moderated the thing, after all. Much of the vitriol headed his way grinds at his inability to enforce time limits, which are arbitrary and dumb anyhow."