Sanders camp spars with CBS over debate: report

by Devin Henry - 11/14/15 5:58 PM ET

The campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is fighting CBS News’s decision to change the format of Saturday night’s presidential debate to focus more on foreign policy, according to a report.

A Sanders aide was heard arguing with CBS executives Saturday in an exchange a source classified to Yahoo News as “heated” and “bizarre.”

{mosads}After the Friday terror attacks in Paris, CBS decided to increase the focus on national security and terrorism in Saturday night’s debate.

Officials with Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley, the two other Democratic presidential nominees, did not fight the change, according to the report, but a Sanders strategist opposed the decision.

“The Sanders representative, you know, really laid into CBS and basically … kind of threw like a little bit of a fit and said, ‘You are trying to turn this into a foreign policy debate. That’s not what any of us agreed to. How can you change the terms of the debate, you know, on the day of the debate? That’s not right,’ ” a staffer for one of the other campaigns told Yahoo News.

CBS defended the decision and told the campaigns it is not completely changing the format of the debate, according to the report, but putting an early focus on the Paris attacks.

But Sanders’s aide, the report said, still objected, and “he got very hot and there was like a five- or seven-minute back and forth and he just wouldn’t let it go,” the campaign source told Yahoo News.

The Democrats meet in their second presidential debate Saturday evening in Des Moines.

The 2016 election cycle has already produced a series of spats between candidates and television networks over presidential debates.

Republicans strongly objected to the way CNBC moderators handled a debate in October, with the Republican National Committee going as far as to pull out of a February NBC News debate as a result.

Party officials were much more receptive to the debate Fox Business hosted earlier this week.

Tags Bernie Sanders Hillary Clinton