Reviews of last night's awful debate

The media is in uproar over ABC's debate between Hillary and Barack. Jason Linkins, of the Huffington Post, said "there were times when tonight's debate ventured into territory so utterly asinine that I could scarcely believe what I was witnessing." The Washington Post's Tom Shales said Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos "turned in shoody, despicable performances."

For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with.

Stephanopoulos, a former Clinton aide, and Gibson were obviously biased against Obama. From Shales:

To this observer, ABC's coverage seemed slanted against Obama. The director cut several times to reaction shots of such Clinton supporters as her daughter, Chelsea, who sat in the audience at the Kimmel Theater in Philly's National Constitution Center. Obama supporters did not get equal screen time, giving the impression that there weren't any in the hall. The director also clumsily chose to pan the audience at the very start of the debate, when the candidates made their opening statements, so Obama and Clinton were barely seen before the first commercial break.

Ed Rendell's off the record comments after the debate are a tribute to the moderators' bias:
From Chris Bowers of Open Left:

I went to the spin room after the debate, looking for someone from ABC in order to ask them about the questions in the first half of the debate. Unfortunately, in the spin room, a vortex of discourse was eating its own tail as the signifier drowned the signified in a rusty bathtub in the corner, so I fled out of a deep sense of existential horror. As I was walking back to the filing center, I passed Governor Ed Rendell just as he was finishing an interview. Afterwards, appearing very happy, he said the following to someone standing next to him, revealing not only what he thought of the debate, but also of the early questions at the debate:

"Even an Obama Kool-Aid drinking guy like yourself has to admit she scored a decisive victory tonight. A decisive victory. A knockout blow. A decisive victory. A decisive victory. Even more decisive when they started asking real questions."

Calling it a "gotcha debate," Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, said the news commentators' questions made her "angry, frustrated and, yes, bitter." From vanden Heuvel:

Tonight, Gibson seemed shocked when the two candidates spoke of raising taxes on the very richest in this country. He seemed far more concerned about the Democratic candidates' proposal to raise the capital gains tax--and what he claimed would be the lost revenue-- than the fact, as the New York Times's Steven Greenhouse reports in his new must-read book, The Big Squeeze, that "since 1979, hourly earnings for 80 percent of American workers have risen by just 1, after inflation...[at a time when]the nation's economic pie is growing, but corporations by and large have not given their workers a bigger piece."