Orts #788 - Sept.25
In Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie....This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world....If the Leader says of such and such an event, 'It never happened' — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.
— George Orwell, in an essay, Looking Back on the Spanish War (1943)
In 1858, tens of thousands of people watched Lincoln debate Douglas when the two competed for a Senate seat in Illinois. The opening speaker had sixty minutes, the second speaker had ninety minutes, and then the opening speaker had thirty more minutes. The really significant thing about the Lincoln-Douglas debates wasn’t the debates themselves but the fact that they were published two years later, when Lincoln and Douglas were running for President. The book was published in six states. Lincoln won all six and, with them, the election.
— Jill Lepore, The State of the Presidential Debate, in The New Yorker, September 19, 2016
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/19/the-state-of-the-presidential-debate?mbid=nl_160913_Daily&CNDID=25787760&spMailingID=9509166&spUserID=MTMzMTgyNzEyNDc1S0&spJobID=1001088530&spReportId=MTAwMTA4ODUzMAS2
If you read only the records of the Constitutional Convention and the Lincoln-Douglas debates, you’d have a pretty sophisticated understanding of American history and politics. The same cannot be said of watching any or all of the televised Presidential debates from 1976 to 2012.
—Jill Lepore, in the same article
quoted in the same New Yorker article:
I would like to propose that we transform our circus-atmosphere presidential campaign into a great debate conducted in full view of all the people.
— Adlai Stevenson, in 1959
The debates are part of the unconscionable fraud that our political campaigns have become.
— Walter Cronkite, in 1998