Media bias is more often sensed than seen, but America got its faced rubbed in it Tuesday night — by debate “moderator” Candy Crowley.
CNN’s Crowley selected both questions and questioners — both of which largely skewed left. She let President Obama dominate, giving him 4 minutes and 18 seconds more speaking time.
She interrupted Obama nine times, but she squelched Mitt Romney fully 28 times — repeatedly cutting him off just as he was scoring points. Once she told him to shut up, telling him: “See all these people? They’ve been waiting for you. Make it short.”
She never did that to Obama.
She flat-out ordered: “If I could have you sit down, Gov. Romney” — but never asked the equally aggressive Obama to sit.
When Romney tried to respond at several points, she cut him off, saying “it doesn’t quite work like that” and promising to “give you a chance” later on.
Needless to say, she never did.
But the most blatant evidence of bias was her instant “fact checking” of Romney’s quite correct insistence that Obama took weeks to call the Benghazi debacle a terrorist attack. She jumped to Obama’s defense, saying “he did call it an act of terror.”
But she was flat-out wrong.
Which is why a grinning Obama urged: “Can you say that a little louder, Candy?”
But Obama’s reference was to generic “acts of terror” and framed in the context of the 9/11 attacks of 2001— and not the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi atrocity.
Not until 17 days later — after endless administration distortions — did Obama acknowledge that it was a planned attack.
Yesterday, Crowley belatedly acknowledged, “The president did not say it was . . . an act of terror.” But the damage was done.
Ironically, though, not so much to Romney — even the most casual observer long knew the facts — but to Crowley herself.
And to the media.
It has long had its thumb on the scale — but rarely so publicly, nor so shamelessly.
Way to go, Ms. Crowley.