Well, it looks like Kerry’s going to have a disadvantage when it comes to how he looks in the first debate:
Fox News gets to operate all the cameras at the debate? It’s safe to say that the cameras will conveniently zoom in on every gaffe Kerry might make, while conveniently panning away whenever Bush starts to look un-Presidential…
(I was going to link to the article, but the latest version of the article on Yahoo! omits the last two paragraphs quoted above. Fortunately, I still have the RSS feed from this morning on my PDA…)
Are you being deliberately dense? The Bush guys want a fixed point camera shot of Kerry so he can’t work to his strengths…i.e. be able to move around, and gesture outside of a fixed camera shot. Fox is saying they will have multiple angles ANYWAYS, reguardless of what Bush wants. Would you care to explain how YOU read this rjung so that it means Fox is pandering to Bush on this one?? I’d really like to know.
The Bush campaign doesn’t want Kerry wandering around during the debate. They’ve got that.
The Bush campaign wanted television cameras fixed only on the speaking candidate during the debate. They didn’t get that.
In other words, the only point the Bush campaign lost was to the television audience, not to the Kerry campaign.
And let’s just say that, given Fox News’ long-established reputation for blatant bias towards everything related to the Republican Party, the odds of Kerry getting flattering video imagery from their cameras (the only ones actually at the debates, mind you) are lower than the odds that Michael Moore will endorse the Bush-Cheney ticket come November.
Man, even I think that this is a bit nutty. What do you think is going to happen? Every time the camera pans to bush it’s going to get that fuzzy, bad romance camera shot to “soften him up” and every time it pans to Kerry they’re going to shine a spot light on him and focus in on his wrinkles. Maybe every time he speaks they’ll just cut to a shot of his ass to make the point that Kerry is speaking out of his ass. :rolleyes: You really need a calmative rjung.
As for the debates, I think that they are too scripted for anyone to really win it. It’s basically the same crap that they’ve been saying at every campaing stop, in every press release, and on every tv spot. The only thing I can see in either candidates favor is that this may be a chance for Kerry to finally get out more of a stand on issues that aren’t Iraq. If he can do that he may start to pull ahead on this.
I don’t know what’s going to happen; I simply suspect that, given Fox’s track record, Mr. Kerry better not have an itchy nose, or a sweaty brow, or any other socially-awkward-moment in tonight’s debate – because I suspect the Fox boys will pounce on it like a pit bull on a T-bone. And since they’re the ones manning the cameras for all the networks, we (the audience) won’t have a lot of alternatives to choose from.