The Republican National Committee (RNC) on Friday told NBC it was suspending their broadcast partnership after the US network’s cable news subsidiary was accused of asking questions in “bad faith” during the party’s last presidential debate.
“Pending further discussion between the RNC and our presidential campaigns, we are suspending the partnership with NBC News for the Republican primary debate at the University of Houston on February 26, 2016,” the committee’s chairman Reince Priebus wrote to NBC News chairman Andrew Lack.
“The CNBC network is one of your media properties, and its handling of the debate was conducted in bad faith,” Priebus said.
“We need to ensure there is not a repeat performance,” he said.
CNBC moderators have faced a major backlash over their handling of the third Republican debate of the primary campaign on Wednesday in Colorado.
Candidates and observers admonished them for being too aggressive, straying off the announced topic of economics and finance, and pitting candidates against one another.
While debates are supposed to include tough questioning and contrast candidates and their visions, “CNBC’s moderators engaged in a series of ‘gotcha’ questions, petty and mean-spirited in tone, and designed to embarrass our candidates,” Priebus said.
“While we are suspending our partnership with NBC News and its properties, we still fully intend to have a debate on that day, and will ensure that National Review remains part of it,” he said.
The conservative National Review magazine is one of the host partners for the debate on Feb. 26 next year, along with NBC and its Spanish language network, Telemundo.
NBC News issued a quick response, describing the RNC’s move as “a disappointing development.”
“However, we will work in good faith to resolve this matter with the Republican Party,” it said.
NBC could stand to lose major advertising revenue with the suspension of its debate broadcast rights.
The first Republican debate on Fox News, where moderators were also seen as aggressive, drew a record 24 million viewers. Wednesday’s debate drew 14 million.
Candidates, faced with CNBC’s questioning, lashed out on stage.
When moderator John Harwood interrupted New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as he attempted to answer a question, Christie shot back: “Even in New Jersey, what you’re doing is called rude.”
“This is not a cage match,” US Senator Ted Cruz added. “And you look at the questions — ‘Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain?’ ‘Ben Carson, can you do math?’... ‘Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?’ How about talking about the substantive issues people care about,” he said to a loud roar from the crowd.
Cruz used the Republican outrage over the debate moderators to appeal to donors.
“I am declaring war on the liberal media,” he began in a fundraising e-mail on Friday.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
Cook Islands officials yesterday said they had discussed seabed minerals research with China as the small Pacific island mulls deep-sea mining of its waters. The self-governing country of 17,000 people — a former colony of close partner New Zealand — has licensed three companies to explore the seabed for nodules rich in metals such as nickel and cobalt, which are used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Despite issuing the five-year exploration licenses in 2022, the Cook Islands government said it would not decide whether to harvest the potato-sized nodules until it has assessed environmental and other impacts. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and