"A shameful night for the U.S. media"

"A new low for journalism"

"O... M... F... G..."

"Tabloid journalism at it's worst"

"The collapse of the national press"

The "Clinton-Obama debate: ABC decides top issues facing Americans are gaffes, flag pins and '60s radicals"

Attytood writes a letter to repuke stooges Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos:

"What I just watched was an outrage. As a journalist, you appeared to confirm all of the worst qualities that cause people to hold our profession in such low esteem, especially your obsession with cornering the candidates with lame "trick" questions and your complete lack of interest or concern about substance...

"Quickly, a word to any and all of my fellow journalists who happen to read this open letter. This. Must. Stop. Tonight, if possible. I thought that we had hit rock bottom in March 2003, when we failed to ask the tough questions in the run-up to the Iraq war. But this feels even lower."

George Mitchell of Editor and Publisher:

"In perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years, ABC News hosts Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous focused mainly on trivial issues as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama faced off in Philadelphia.

"Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the health care and mortgage crises, the overall state of the economy and dozens of other pressing issues had to wait for their few moments in the sun as Obama was pressed to explain his recent "bitter" gaffe and relationship with Rev. Wright (seemingly a dead issue) and not wearing a flag pin while Clinton had to answer again for her Bosnia trip exaggerations.

"[N]either candidate had the courage to ask the moderators to turn to those far more important issues. But some in the crowd did -- booing Gibson near the end.

"Yet David Brooks' review at the New York Times concluded: "I thought the questions were excellent." He gave ABC an "A." {Of course he did! - Ed.}

"But Tom Shales of the Washington Post had an opposite view: "Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances."

From USA Toady:

"For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with," Tom Shales writes.

Guardian America's deadlineUSA blog issues its verdict with the headline: "Worst. Debate. Ever."

Andrew Sullivan seems to agree. He slams the Gibson-Stephanopoulos team in The Atlantic's Daily Dish blog. "The loser was ABC News: one of the worst media performances I can remember - petty, shallow, process-obsessed, trivial where substantive, and utterly divorced from the actual issues that Americans want to talk about," he says. " At the end of the debate, it appeared that the crowd was actually heckling Gibson."

HuffPo: "ABC hosts heckled after debate: 'The crowd is turning on me.'"

They should've used fucking pitchforks. From Salon’s Walter Shapiro:

"Broadcast to a prime-time network audience on ABC and devoid of a single policy question during its opening 50 minutes, the debate easily could have convinced the uninitiated that American politics has all the substance of a Beavis and Butt-Head marathon."

Fire! Fire! Fire! Bung-hole!