Some campaigns want a level of control that they would get from running and paying for the debates themselves. Photograph by Rick Wilking/Reuters

In early 2013, the R.N.C., under its current chairman, Reince Priebus, produced a searching report that tried to make sense of Mitt Romney’s 2012 defeat. When the report was released, the biggest news was its frank dissection of the G.O.P.’s weakness among groups that voted overwhelmingly for Obama. “Public perception of the Party is at record lows,” the document noted. “Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the Party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.”

But, beyond the demographic warnings contained in the report, Priebus’s team also cautioned that the Republican Party was living in a cocoon. The report said that the G.O.P. was “increasingly marginalizing itself” at the federal level. “The Republican Party needs to stop talking to itself,” the report said. “We have become expert in how to provide ideological reinforcement to like-minded people, but devastatingly we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us on every issue.”

One of the report’s less-well-known recommendations had to do with primary debates. The number of G.O.P. Presidential primary debates had grown from six in 1980 to twenty in 2012. Republicans wanted to gain some control over the process in 2016. “The number of debates has become ridiculous, and they’re taking candidates away from other important campaign activities,” the report noted. The report recommended that the G.O.P. sanction no more than ten to twelve debates, a recommendation that Priebus later implemented.

But there was another recommendation that wasn’t adopted. Buried in the report was this idea:

We are intrigued with the suggestion some have made for an organization to be formed that can host robust, vigorous, tough, and professional debates. Doing so would create an additional impetus for candidates to participate in R.N.C.-sanctioned debates only, but even if this happens, it will remain important to work closely with the media so they agree to broadcast them. After all, there is no point in putting on a debate that almost no one watches. It makes no sense to take back the debates so we can keep them to ourselves.

Ultimately, the R.N.C. decided against setting up its own organization to run its debates. Instead, it stuck with the model of partnering with media organizations to conduct them, partly because of the high costs of running its own debates and partly because the R.N.C. worried that setting up its own debates might make the events less credible.

All of this was decided long before any of the candidates announced their campaigns for President. (The Republican debate schedule was released in January, 2014.) The candidates were essentially stuck with the agreements that the R.N.C. had already negotiated with the various media outlets.

Last week, after the CNBC debate that most of the candidates complained was unfair and featured hostile moderators, the campaigns finally revolted against the Priebus-negotiated debates. Representatives from most of the Republican Presidential campaigns met near Washington on Sunday night to wrest control from Priebus and the R.N.C. Today, they released a draft letter with their demands—which essentially consist of having their cake and eating it, too. The campaigns that sign the letter want the media to host and televise the events, but they want a level of control that they would get from running them and paying for them themselves. (Donald Trump is reportedly going to negotiate on his own.) The section of the letter that immediately caught the attention of many in the media was the following:

In addition, based on their evaluation of previous debates, the campaigns wish to have in all future debates a minimum 30-second opening statement and a minimum 30-second closing statement for each participant; candidate pre-approval of any graphics and bios you plan to include in your broadcast about each candidate, and that there be no “lightning rounds” because of their frivolousness or “gotcha” nature, or in some cases both.

Most people would agree that the Republican (and Democratic) Parties should have some say in how the debates are run and organized. These are, after all, not just news events or typical media interviews. They are partnerships between the media and a political party. It’s fair that the mechanics of the debate, such as the format, length of time, rules, and the moderators, should all be up for negotiation. For instance, the R.N.C. asked its mainstream-media partners to add a conservative media outlet to the events, to insure that the questioning would reflect some of the issues important to Republican primary voters.

But surely the red line for any media organization has to be editorial content. After all, the R.N.C. rejected the option of running these debates on its own. It is the media that is paying for the events, and it is over the media’s airwaves that the events are broadcast.

Of course, if the candidates don’t get their way, they don’t have to attend the debates. They could, as they have threatened to do, boycott future R.N.C.-sanctioned events, just as Donald Trump threatened to boycott the CNBC debate. (There’s a precedent for this. In 2007, the Democrats cancelled a Fox News debate, though in that case Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton did not demand to control any elements of Fox News’s editorial content as a precondition for participating in the event.)

What the candidates shouldn’t be allowed to do is tell reporters what questions to ask or what graphics to show on the screen, or have any role whatsoever in the editorial judgments of a news organization. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan’s famous quip, if the G.O.P. wants that much control, then it needs to pay for the microphone.