This is the On the Media Midweek podcast on Brooklady Stone.

Earlier this month, Ronan McDaniel, chairman of the Republican National Committee, wrote

a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates, the independent bipartisan organization

that has convened general election debates since the 80s.

In her letter, she said that the RNC would boycott the presidential debates during the upcoming

election cycle.

It is, unless the Commission was willing to meet its demands.

The move is the latest refusal by Republicans to meet political norms, and it poses the question,

what if anything, would be lost if the presidential debates didn't happen?

Alex Shefford is staff writer at the New Republic.

He recently wrote the article, let the presidential debates die.

What's the beef?

For the last ten years more or less, the Republican National Committee has been complaining

that these debates implicitly favor Democrats largely because they say that moderators

with connections to the Democratic Party, most notably George Stephanopoulos, are favored

over moderators that might have more Republican leanings.

But they also want to stop what they see as the slow growth of fact-checking in these

debates.

This began in 2012 when Katie Crowley moderating in a debate between Mitt Romney and Barack

Obama stepped in to gently correct Mitt Romney.

Because it took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi, an active

terror.

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