Debate Fireworks

When Senator Marco Rubio said in last night's debate that the mainstream media was in fact a Democratic Party Super Pac he was expressing an opinion that was amply reinforced by the panel of CNBC moderators who subjected the GOP candidates to what was surely the most tendentious, irresponsibly partisan line of questioning in the history of presidential debates.

The Federalist staff summarizes the CNBC team's blatant and unprofessional bias this way:

The debate was barely 30 minutes in, but Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) stole the show when he went directly after CNBC’s Republican primary debate moderators, who had spent a good portion of the debate using their questions as an excuse to attack the Republican candidates on stage.

Cruz specifically called out CNBC moderators John Harwood, Becky Quick, and Carl Quintanilla for repeatedly asking loaded, partisan questions of the Republican candidates. Harwood’s first question to Donald Trump was whether Trump felt like a comic book villain. Becky Quick asked Carly Fiorina why she was so bad at her job. Carl Quintanilla asked Marco Rubio why he hadn’t resigned from the Senate already.

Harwood followed up his idiotic and universally panned Trump question by inviting liberal Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R-Ohio), who’s polling at 1 percent in multiple polls, to criticize every candidate to his right. When he finally got the opportunity to answer a question, Cruz went straight at the moderators, pointing out that they were proving with their slanted questions why American trust in media is at record lows.

Here's Cruz:

and Rubio:

Too many contemporary journalists see themselves as extensions of the candidates they support and see their jobs as vehicles for promoting those candidates and destroying the opposition. They sacrifice professional objectivity to political partisanship and diminish themselves in the process.

Here's a montage of the candidates' responses to some of the more egregious questions they were asked: