Carol,

I agree that the News Hour does it better.....the problem I am addressing however is that the power position of the panel is not in its balance right to left, or even in how much time each has to answer, or even in how civil the debate is--it's in who gets to frame and ask the questions.

There's another flaw I've noticed in the notion of "objective reporting" and news as it is done today. The notion that a person can offer up a point of view that is objectively wrong, the reporter knows it, and yet, in the name of "objectivity" fails to point it out. Sure, sometimes a liar just comes across as silly, but most often, this type of "objectivity" actually lends credibility to things that the reporter knows to be untrue----the reporter actually becomes complicitous in the lie.

I don't know how you feel about the adaquecy of those who are suppose to be answering for your side of the debate (on the news hour), but I am usually quite dissatisfied with who they choose to represent mine. I think that is often because they feel the need to be civil and are usually always caught off guard (though after all this time they shouldn't be) at the way the questions are framed. The only example I can think of off the top of my head to illustrate just what I mean came during the budget debates of '95. All questions were framed in a manner that accepted the nomenclature(I know that's the wrong word but I can't think of the right one right now) "budget cuts", even though, objectively speaking, 1. this gave the emotional arguement to the democrats, and 2.It was objectively wrong use of language--there were no cuts---not one budget item was to be less than the previous year, even if adjusted for inflation. Still, this was how the questioniing was always framed.

I don't know if you saw the thread a week or so ago that had that questionaire that purported to be able to place you on a scale of conservative/liberal authoritarian/i-forget-what. It was the point I made there---the questions seemed to be framed from the liberal's understanding of how they thought a conservative believed, not how we actually believe. That made the questions very difficult to answer. I think the same thing happens on the News Hour.

On the other hand, I believe that the other thing that makes conservatives uncomfortable in many of the News Hours type of questions is that, though the conservatives may believe that their concepts and policies are objectively better, they know that it is human nature to be liberal---heck, it's genetic, and they know before answering, that they are going to have to answer in a very unpopular way-----and they're generally too weak to do so (just my observation).