Recent attempts by some Republican presidential candidates to control the questions they are asked in televised debates has been likened to the behavior of Russian and Syrian presidents Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad by a senior adviser to rival GOP contender John Kasich.  With tension still running high between several of the top Republican hopefuls and mainstream media outlets ahead of Tuesday’s presidential debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, John Weaver, the chief strategist of the Kasich campaign, has accused rivals for the party’s nomination of in effect adopting dictatorial tactics. “I don’t think it’s for the candidates to dictate how the moderators frame questions – that would be comparable to Vladimir Putin or Assad,” he told the Guardian.  Weaver said that in his personal opinion some of the questions that had been put to candidates in previous Republican debates could have been worded differently. “But at the end of the day, candidates are competing to be president of the United States, not for a post in the Boy Scouts. If you can’t handle questions from moderators – whether they are easy or tough – then what are you doing here?”  Tuesday’s GOP debate at the Milwaukee Theatre will open at 8pm CST as the fallout of the last such debate hosted by CNBC last month continues to reverberate in conservative circles. Following on from feisty exchanges between Megyn Kelly of Fox News and Donald Trump in the first Republican TV debate in August, the CNBC event erupted into open hostility from several of the candidates in response to what were perceived as “gotcha” questions from the moderators.  Ted Cruz complained that the candidates were being treated as if they were in a “cage match”, and Marco Rubio dubbed the media “Hillary Clinton’s Super Pac”.  The delicate job of following the CNBC debacle will fall this time to Fox Business Network, supported by the Wall Street Journal. The two leading FBN moderators, Neil Cavuto and Maria Bartiromo, have promised to avoid a renewed round of antagonism by focusing the discussion on the candidates’ economic plans, rather than the point-scoring questions CNBC was accused of leveling last month. “My goal is to make myself invisible, that I’m not the issue,” Cavuto told Politico.  How the TV moderators walk the tightrope of Tuesday’s debate – negotiating the need to placate the candidates while maintaining the appearance of journalistic independence – will be a matter of intense scrutiny. In the wake of the CNBC-hosted event, several of the leading Republican contenders issued an open challenge to the media.  Related: Rand Paul: 'I still am' the political world's most interesting man  They called for changes to the debate format. A prominent Republican lawyer, Ben Ginsberg, was enlisted to draw up a set of demands that included mandatory opening and closing statements, a ban on camera shots of candidates’ empty podiums when they take a lavatory break, and preapproval of bios and on-screen graphics.  Questions that involved candidates putting up their hands or that require yes or no answers were also to be banned.  The Ginsberg letter sounded a threatening note for the TV networks to which it was sent. The networks were encouraged to ask questions based on the “candidates’ vision of the future”, and if they did not that would determine whether the presidential hopefuls wished “to participate in your future debates”.  As Weaver’s comments to the Guardian underlined, not all the main-stage Republican contenders joined in the aggressive issuing of an ultimatum to the media. Donald Trump, who remains in the No 1 position in the tracking polls, also decided in classic Trump-style to do his own thing.  Fox Business Network has been spared having to abide by the Ginsberg demands, partly perhaps because of the strong obeisance shown by senior Republicans towards Roger Ailes, the chairman and CEO of Fox News and Fox Business Network. Nonetheless, some changes will be on display in Milwaukee that could notably influence the tone of the debate.  By whittling down the cast of candidates from 10 to eight – in order of ranking Trump, Ben Carson, Rubio, Cruz, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, Kasich and Rand Paul – FBN will instantly reduce the cacophony and freneticism that has marked previous debates. The network has also agreed to extend the cutoff time for candidates’ answers from 60 to 90 seconds.  One of the key sensitivities for Fox will be how they balance the need to sidestep the perceived pitfalls into which CNBC stumbled while at the same time avoiding any appearance of soft-balling the candidates. In particular, observers will be watching to see whether the moderators are prepared to ask leading contenders some of the hard questions that have surfaced in recent days about apparent dissembling over their personal histories.  Top of the pile here will be Carson, the former neurosurgeon and Seventh Day Adventist who is snapping at Trump’s heels in the polls. He has come under pressure from media revelations that he was less than accurate in the biographical details he gave in his book Gifted Hands, including the claim that he was offered a full scholarship to West Point military academy, had tried to stab a friend at school, and that he was the most honest student in his class at Yale.  Following close behind Carson will be Rubio, who has faced his own media demons over the past few days over his use of an American Express card for personal expenditures when the card was issued in the name of the Republican party of Florida. Rubio has insisted he repaid all the personal expenses, and issued records of the spending over the weekend.  Carson has responded to the recent flurry of allegations that he has played fast and loose over his own personal story by adopting the same hostile stance towards the media as Rubio and Cruz showed towards CNBC when they were asked pointed questions at last month’s debate. The retired neurosurgeon has lashed out at “biased media” and their “hit jobs”.  How this ongoing spat will play out on stage in Milwaukee will depend in large part on how the moderators choose to negotiate the subject of Carson’s biographical discrepancies. It will be hard for them to skirt around the issue entirely, particularly as the Yale story was broken by the Wall Street Journal – whose editor-in-chief, Gerard Baker, will be one of Tuesday’s moderators.  Other GOP campaigns clearly see questions about their rivals’ personal records as fair game. “This is a tough business,” Weaver said. “If a candidate has something in their background or finances or whatever that they don’t want to talk about, then maybe they shouldn’t be running.”  Related: Ben Carson: inside the worldview of a political conundrum  David Folkenflik, the media correspondent of National Public Radio, said that under Ailes’ tutelage, Fox Business Network was unlikely to try and avoid controversy for the sake of harmony with Republican presidential hopefuls. “Ailes is perfectly happy to have his anchors push politicians with tough questions. He wants to see good TV, and that means fireworks.”  He added that the Fox News chief also “likes to see his channels act as the proving ground of Republican candidates, putting them through their paces and demanding from them deference to Fox”.  Ailes has a lot riding on the debate. The first three GOP debates have turned out to be huge ratings monsters, breaking viewing records for Fox News (24 million people tuned into its August debate); CNN (23 million in September); and CNBC (14 million last month) – and Ailes is not the kind of chief executive who would settle for a ratings slide on his watch.  On the GOP side, candidates are pushed by an equal and opposite incentive to continue attacking the media, which has long been a favorite bogey figure for hardline American conservatives. That played out in 2008 when Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin made attacks on the “lamestream media” a mainstay of her stump speeches. Four years later, Newt Gingrich picked up the baton when he tore into the “destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media” at a CNN-hosted debate.  Why media-bashing should be such a popular pastime among key Republicans is relatively easily explained by reference to opinion surveys which suggest that the politicians are merely pandering to the prejudices of rightwing voters. A Pew Research Center study last year found that consistent conservative voters were distrustful of almost every major media company in the country, displaying a daunting and almost impenetrable hostility towards outlets as diverse as NPR, CBS News, USA Today and Yahoo News.  The only media outlets that were embraced by conservative voters were the rightwing websites the Blaze, Breitbart and the Drudge Report; talkshow hosts Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh; and, significantly for tonight’s debate, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.
Fox Business Network is burdened with task of asking incisive questions without further antagonizing pugnacious GOP contenders following the CNBC fallout