After the first 2024 Republican Presidential debate Wednesday, a question continued to surface: Is the current format the best format? 710 WOR host Mark Simone has similar questions but believes a shift in attention span has altered the debate format.
At the first debate Wednesday, Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum mixed up questions and how long answers could be at various times throughout the debate. Simone said that while Baier and MacCallum did good work in their roles, they were bound by limits of viewers’ attention.
“It’s a terrible format. The worst. But this one was pretty good,” The Mark Simone Show host argued. “A lightning round? ‘I want a one-word answer’. This should be illegal. It’s a presidential candidate and a one-word answer? I want to hear the guy talk. I want to hear him in depth on here. Some sudden ‘I want a one-word answer here’, and then 30 seconds? You know, the Lincoln/Douglas debates, I think, went on for five days. And when they brought up the topic, each person spoke for a half an hour on the topic.
“But it’s the internet age. It’s the Twitter world. You can’t talk for a half hour on anything. Nobody’s gonna listen. Even on a TV show, every segment — five guests, three minutes, boom, on to the next thing. So it’s just the way people are built nowadays, but the debates always get criticism. It’s just normal.”
