Moderators’ stumbles aside, CNBC scored big

The Republican presidential primary debate continued its run as the season’s hottest TV ratings hit, delivering an average of 14 million viewers for CNBC on Wednesday.

The audience was the lowest of the three GOP candidate showdowns so far, but the debate still delivered the highest number in the 26-year history of NBCUniversal’s business and finance-news cable channel, which typically averages about 343,000 viewers in prime time.

The ratings were a bit of a salve for CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla, Becky Quick and John Harwood, the moderators of the two-hour event at the University of Colorado at Boulder. They were pummeled by critics, pundits and Republican Party officials for their handling of the debate. The candidates continued to pile on Thursday morning.

“The moderators just didn’t do their job last night in a number of areas,” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “Not only were the questions snarky and divisive and nonsubstantive, 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. And it became somewhat of a free-for-all that everybody had to jump in when you could jump in.”

The moderating team’s occasional stumbles offered the candidates an opening to turn the partisan crowd against them and avoid delivering straight answers to what in most cases were tough queries.

Quick had perhaps the worst moment as she asked Republican front-runner Donald Trump about his criticism of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for bringing in immigrant workers. When Trump falsely denied it, she did not have her source material — the candidate’s own website — at the ready to call him on it.

“This is the big leagues, and if you show weakness they will kill you,” said one NBC News insider. “They turned it on them very quickly.”

Competing cable news channels, most notably Fox News, gave Republican talking heads and commentators free rein to dump on CNBC’s moderator panel during its post-debate programming.

But many of the second-day analysis by political writers showed that the claims the moderators raised in their questions that the candidates disputed were factually accurate.