by Brett Chandrasekhar

After watching the debate last night, I concluded that Trump lost by constantly being on defense. At first, I blamed this on him. He didn’t counterattack as effectively as he could have, and he missed easy opportunities to bring up Clinton’s scandals. However, after reviewing the transcript, I’ve come to a different conclusion: Trump lost largely due to the bias of the moderator, Lester Holt.

Most people will think I’m talking about fact-checking, but for the most part, I didn’t have a problem with that. Instead, the questions asked were extremely skewed in Clinton’s favor. Holt spent the debate lobbing softballs to Hillary and asking hard-hitting questions to Trump.

Here’s a list of the tough questions asked of both candidates: I found 5 for Trump and 2 for Clinton.

Donald Trump:

1 – asked about releasing his tax returns

2 – asked about stop and frisk being unconstitutional

3 – asked about the birther conspiracy

4 – asked about his support of the Iraq War in 2002

5 – asked about his criticism of Clinton’s “look”

Hillary Clinton:

1 – asked about e-mail servers

2 – asked about her statement that police have an implicit bias against blacks

Now, even with this scorecard, I’m being extremely charitable. I could have scored this 5 to 0. The first hard-hitting question to Clinton, regarding her e-mail servers, was asked after Trump brought it up. In other words, Holt was giving Clinton a chance to respond to Trump. I added it to the scorecard because I was giving Holt the benefit of the doubt that he was about to bring it up anyway (but perhaps I’m incorrect do so).

The second, about police having an implicit bias against blacks, some could argue was not even a tough question. I certainly didn’t recognize it as such when I first watched the debate.

This sort of Clinton favoritism isn’t due to a lack of tough questions that could be asked of her. She has had numerous scandals, most notoriously her use of a private e-mail server and the favoritism given to donors of the Clinton Foundation. She has also had many foreign policy disasters, such as her own support for the Iraq War and her mishandling of Libya. The blatant favoritism is instead due to media bias.

As I said before, I was okay with the fact-checking for the most part. However, there were a few times where Lester Holt appeared visibly dim, such as when he pushed back on Trump’s claimed opposition to the Iraq War. Trump responded that, prior to the war, he had argued privately with Sean Hannity about it. This was clearly a response to the media’s argument that Trump had mildly supported it in an earlier interview in 2002. Yet Holt kept bringing up that argument despite that. [Note: I am not saying Trump is correct, nor that we should believe him. I am saying that when someone makes a counterargument to a fact-check, you don’t keep stating that fact-check over and over again]

The lesson for outsiders (not just Trump’s supporters, but also Libertarians and other third parties) is clear. It’s something we already knew but cannot stress enough. The media will use any method they can in order to defeat outsiders. Yes, there are limits on what they can do. But they will constantly try to skew things in their favor, whether it be through polling, their coverage — or even the questions asked at debates.

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