As we saw developing during our live debate last night, CNBC has become the story of the third GOP primary debate. The network is responding to criticism from the candidates, voters and other media over moderators Becky Quick, John Harwood and Carl Quintanilla.
“People who want to be President of the United States should be able to answer tough questions,” CNBC said in a statement.
While many of the candidates’ closing statements also criticized the moderators, several of them took part in CNBC’s post-debate programs. Donald Trump told CNBC’s Joe Kernen immediately after the debate, “I really had a lot of fun,” adding. “Hillary’s questions were certainly easier than ours were tonight.”
Mike Huckabee and Dr. Ben Carson joined the CNBC.com post-debate analysis as well.
But this morning, on CNBC’s sister network MSNBC, Gov. Chris Christie told Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski: “First of all, the moderators just didn’t do their job last night in a number of areas. Not only were the questions snarky and divisive and non-substantive, they were just biased. The questions were biased. But on top of that, they didn’t do their job in terms of controlling the debate, either.”