The “moderator” – more accurately called the “challenger” – at last night’s presidential candidates’ debate did a very bad job.

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

Lester Holt’s actions at the first presidential debate were inexcusable. And also unsurprising.

The day when media lefties were patient enough to believe that the system would work without being this blatant are over. They’ve been open this election about rejecting even the illusion of objectivity.

The only question is why do Republicans continue to allow mainstream media figures to moderate presidential debates? Lester Holt decided to debate Trump. But you can increasingly expect this kind of behavior from any media figure below a certain age to whom the concept of journalism is a dead and incomprehensible notion. Or rather, to them it means that it’s their duty to attack Republicans.

2012 should have buried this. And I don’t know why we’re still dealing with this in 2016.

A debate between two candidates, one Democrat and one Republican, is the only time that the GOP has unquestionable leverage to get its way by rejecting mainstream media moderators. There are still a handful of journalists working for the big news networks who could be trusted to be fair, but most of them are over 70. There’s obviously no future in that. I can’t think of a single media figure who has any remote credibility in this regard except maybe Tapper.

It’s the right of Republicans to demand independent, professional moderators who can be trusted to do their job of asking questions and checking the time, instead of offering false fact checks and trying to debate the candidates. Lester Holt’s antics should be the final nail in the coffin of the mainstream media moderator.

Hillary Clinton’s replies were so glib, so well rehearsed, it seemed obvious to us that either her campaign had supplied the questions to Holt, or Holt had let her campaign know them in advance. Or perhaps they colluded even more closely. 

Holt baited Donald Trump. But Trump should not have let himself be put on the defensive. He could have brought up Hillary’s easily hacked private server when she talked about cyber attack. She opened the door wide for him to talk about her insistence on bombing Libya. Then he could have attacked her on Benghazi. He repeated himself too much, wasting time. He should have raised the Clinton Foundation corruption without waiting for a question about it.

Still, some good news came out of the fiasco. This is our abstract of a Breitbart report:

From a “flash poll” after last night’s debate by Pat Caddell, the Democratic pollster: “95 percent of the people we contacted told us they were not going to change their vote based on the debate. Two percent of voters, previously undecided, switched to Trump after the debate. No undecideds went to Clinton. Trump won on the most critical factor, on whether Clinton or Trump was more ‘plausible’ as president, 46 percent to her 42 percent. That for him is really what this debate was really about. On ‘Who showed that they care about people like you?’ Trump won 49 percent to 44 percent for her. Trump, as the challenger in this race, gained what he needed. Like most debates, this debate did not shift the race. What it did do was show Trump as a strong leader. Trump really helped himself out tonight.”

Hope so!