Spin Cycle

Gwen Ifill is card-carrying member of the media establishment, so predictably a lot of Names have leapt to defend her neutrality today after questions were raised about whether her contract for an Obama-related book might affect the way she moderates tomorrow night's debate.

As we noted in an item this morning, the book is tentatively titled "The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama." Random House has scheduled its release for Inauguration Day. It is supposed to "shed new light" on Democratic candidate Barack Obama and other "emerging young African American politicians" who are "forging a bold new path to political power."

Questions about Ifill led the Drudge Report this morning and quickly began to reverberate in the conservative echo chamber. Rush Limbaugh said she was "totally in the tank" for Obama. But various media backers -- the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, PBS' Judy Woodruff, bloggers Marc Ambinder and Ben Smith -- came to her defense, arguing that it was a bogus controversy designed to "work the ref" in advance of the Palin debate. Some -- Kurtz, for example -- said it had a "racial subtext" suggesting a black moderator couldn't be impartial.

McCain, for his part, said it didn't "help" but he thought she would be "professional," while Ifill went into high-road mode: "I’ve got a pretty long track record covering politics and news, so I’m not particularly worried that one-day blog chatter is going to destroy my reputation. The proof is in the pudding. They can watch the debate tomorrow night and make their own decisions about whether or not I’ve done my job.”

The view here: There's no doubt that the right raised it with political motives, but that doesn't mean Ifill and her supporters are right.

We've seen moderators questioned on a consistent basis this year -- Russert, Stephanopoulos, Gibson, now Ifill. The partisan operatives who run politics want to eat every possible source of neutral information, undercut it, and force voters to depend on the Red Version or the Blue Version of reality. They have convinced lots of people to not trust the press, and they'd like to convince people not to trust debates, either -- to view them as events skewed by a biased media.

The press is giving them plenty of ammunition. It is out of fashion and uneconomical these days for reporters to be totally straight newspeople. Everybody needs to have an attitude, write a book, blog, opine in web chats or cable meet-the-media shows, move from the media to politics, from politics back to the media. Everybody wants to be famous, make money, show how deep they are.

All these things are fine, and in some ways healthy. But a presidential debate is a national treasure. It happens four times every four years. Organizations that want to run them have to make sure the moderators are purer than the driven snow, and the moderators have to behave accordingly. Neutrality and the appearance of neutrality has to be their watchword.

The question is not whether Ifill will in fact be fair, or whether the Republicans are playing a game on her. It is whether public confidence in the media and the fairness of the political landscape, already pretty shaky, will be enhanced by the decision of a "neutral moderator" to sign a book contract based on the bigness of Obama and schedule it for release on Inauguration Day.

He won't be as big on Jan 20 if he loses, will he? So she won't make as much money, will she?Nor does hype about Obama's "bold new path" suggest dispassionate skepticism. It does not create an appearance of neutrality. The spin today speaks for itself. She's given a lever to people who want to question the fairness of what happens tomorrow night, and their arguments are not absurd.

In the long view, it has polluted the debate, and the debate is more important than Gwen Ifill.