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Kyle Clark, Brandon Rittiman should moderate all the debates

Here’s Kyle Clark grilling Republican Cory Gardner, who went on to oust Mark Udall from his Colorado senate seat in 2014
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May 11, 2015

Kyle Clark. Photo courtesy of KUSA

And Brandon Rittiman. Rittiman and Clark (above) of KUSA-TV in Denver are the winners of this year's Walter Cronkite Awards for Excellence in TV Political Journalism.  Photo courtesy of KUSA

Rittiman and Clark are political reporters at KUSA-TV, the NBC affiliate in Denver. Their station says it has “adopted a ‘pro-fact’ philosophy… which requires tenacity in a world full of tailored-to-fit narratives cooked up by political operatives.” I’d love to see Rittiman and Clark go all pro-fact on Scott Walker, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, and on Hilary Clinton, too, the way they did with Gardner and Udall. I’d love to see Rittiman fact-check presidential campaign ads as mercilessly as he has for state races in Colorado. That these two guys in local TV news are getting the airtime and resources they have is an industry exception that ought to be the rule.

Do you watch local TV news? Do you know many people who do? I don’t. Most people I know have written off local news as all crime, all the time, plus vapid chatter about weather, sports and accidents. I don’t think that’s wildly unfair. In Los Angeles, if I want hard news, the last place I’d think to look for it would be a TV set tuned to local news.

But that just proves what a freaking bubble I live in.

In fact, local TV news is the “>http://www.learcenter.org/project/ca/. For Rittiman’s ad watches, KUSA has also won a prize named for Brooks Jackson, founding director of “>Handicapping the likely suspects has already begun. Personally, I can’t think of a better plan than to have all the presidential candidates subjected to Rittiman and Clark.

I don’t doubt that current White House contenders are preparing their own versions of Newt Gingrich’s

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