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.
Exactly. Salmon is the factotum of Fox debates!