Yeah, that’s what everyone usually says, when they post from some Marxist source. See, here’s the thing with Marxists: they take stuff out of context, tweak it a bit, and throw it at the wall. By the time someone like me does the research, someone like you has posted it a dozen more times. Silly season.
LOL. Sorry, Stirewalt has a YUGE ego and loves to run his mouth on Twitter. Ditto for Missy Megyn.
KURTZ: I spoke with Chris Stirewalt, Fox’s Digital Politics Editor, and a key member of that team.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KURTZ: Chris Stirewalt, welcome.
CHRIS STIREWALT, FOX NEWS DIGITAL POLITICS EDITOR: Great to be here as always.
KURTZ: You’ve been to this rodeo before. How do you and Megyn Kelly, and Bret Baier and Chris Wallace go about formulating your questions, knowing that the candidates are going to try to pivot to their talking points?
STIREWALT: Well, the first thing is we have a secret weapon and that is Bill Salmon, who is the best at not only team cohesion and keeping everybody on point about what the point is, but in crafting the questions.
KURTZ: Washington Bureau Chief.
STIREWALT: Absolutely. He’s Managing Editor and a great mind and a great journalist and that’s a big help. But the idea is this, people forget about what we do and in the discussion of this debate we hear well, what will Trump say to Bush and what will Walker say to Rubio, and what will they say? They are forgetting what this is, and if you go back and look what we did, and you remember you covered it — what we did in 2012. We have built some diabolically tough questions that are difficult to answer. You’re not going to hear Megyn Kelly or Bret Baier or Chris Wallace go out and ask — remember the question from CNN in 2012 to Newt Gingrich about his swinger wife allegation and oh, just awful, that stuff. You’re not going to hear that. You’re going to hear questions about what matters to Republican primary voters as they try to make their choice.
KURTZ: Since you mentioned Donald Trump, enormous attention to him going into this debate. Bret Baier told Time Magazine that he’s woken up in cold sweat thinking about how to deal with Donald Trump who will be on that stage and not listening. Is this in danger of becoming the Trump show?
STIREWALT: No, because that’s why there’s a system. The system is the candidates have a minute to answer the questions. They have 30 seconds to rebut roughly speaking, obviously this is our telecast so we’ll do with our telecast what’s necessary. I’m not worried about Donald Trump now. I’m not concerned that he’s going to do something reckless. I take him at his word.
KURTZ: Maybe you want him to nominate — because it will be better for ratings and the whole buzz thing.
STIREWALT: Do you know the great thing about being a nerd is I don’t have to worry about all that other stuff and it turns out Fox News is a pretty profitable enterprise whatever Donald Trump does.
KURTZ: Ok. There’s been enormous attention and some criticism to Fox using national polling averages to limit the primetime debate, not the first one, to the top ten, but isn’t even having ten people on a stage going to be somewhat un-wielding for a debate that’s a television show in terms of how much time everyone can get?
STIREWALT: Well, sure obviously. Ten is more than eight, eight is more than four and four is up with two and you end up with two next year, next fall as the people choose between the candidates of two parties.
KURTZ: Is it more of a challenge now?
STIREWALT: Well, of course it’s more of a challenge to do ten than it is do eight. But I would say this, we’ve heard a lot of complaints, we’ve heard a lot of suggestions, some of them offered constructively, oh you want to do these polls, state polls, people on the ground, different things. Our job isn’t to decide who is on the stage. Our job was at the beginning and remains to be setting up the criteria that let people’s opinions be heard and get ourselves out of the way.
KURTZ: We’ll be watching. Chris Stirewalt thanks very much for joining us.
STIREWALT: You bet.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KURTZ: Fox News channel is partnering with Facebook for a full night of debate coverage that starts at 5:00 p.m. Eastern with the first debate, and the primetime debate coverage begins at 8:50 p.m. Eastern hosted as I said by Bret, Chris and Megyn. And you can send your questions for the candidates to Facebook.com/Fox News.
Still to come, your top tweets, MSNBC gets out the wrecking ball and the New York Times spanked over the Hillary e-mail story.
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