Everybody loves a good fight.  Except when a political-debate moderator steps in and engages in anything but.  And then everybody hates a bad fight.

Journalism--and, by way of extension, journalists--should be objective.  Their goal should be to lay out the story; present the facts; and let the chips fall where they may.  In the second presidential debate on Tuesday, October 16, CNN commentator and presidential debate moderator Candy Crowley did anything but.

And I hated the results.

Did Obama "win"?  Did Romney?

Who knows!  Ms. Crowley was so busy failing in her appointed tasks that no one will ever know.  How can a moderator announce, after the rules of the debate have been set in stone and accepted by both parties, that she won't abide by them?  How can a moderator inject her personality so that she appears to have a one-on-one relationship with the debaters?  How can a moderator shamefully neglect to hold the debaters accountable for infractions of the "rules" of the debate?  How can she fail to enforce them? 

More shockingly, how can a moderator inject her personal interpretation (and wrongly, at that) of a statement the president made regarding whether or not he said the day after the attacks that the Libyan murders on American soil actually were "terrorist attacks"?  (Obama sent out his press secretary, Jay Carney, his ambassador, Susan Rice, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and his former press secretary,  Robert Gibbs, to claim the contrary of what he insisted in the debate within hours of the murders.)

To her credit, Crowley came out moments after the debate and said she had made a mistake in saying what she had.  To her everlasting shame, she said the next day that "Romney" was somehow to blame for eliciting her comments by not having phrased his language clearly enough.

I hate poor journalism.  That's because, I suppose, I was trained not to fall into that trap.  I was trained, at the college level, by professional working journalists at the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times and WGN-TV and at other media outlets how to be a responsible journalist.

In thinking back, I recall a guest journalist brought into our Columbia College class from the Israel News to lecture us on the dangers of suppositions.  He asked every one of us to answer a simple question.  "Who presently occupies Jerusalem?"

We answered to a man (well, to a kid), "The Jews."

He smiled, told us what good intentions we had, and how wrong we were.

"Jews," he said, "are followers of the faith of Judaism.  Israelis are the occupants of the Jewish State called Israel."

He went on to say that not all Israelis are Jews, and not all Jews are Israelis.  Therefore, it is Israelis, and not Jews, who are the occupants of Israel.

"Do you see how easy it is to mislead the public by failing to do your journalistic research?"

I did.  And I do. 

And I wish Candy Crowley did likewise.

But she doesn't.  And she won't.  And that's the sad state of affairs to which this nation's once-venerable Fourth Estate has sunk.

And I...am D. J. Herda

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