There’s no reason to listen to debate coaches when they are interviewed by the media on Presidential debates or any election debates.

The reason is obvious: Collegiate or High-School debate has no connection to political debating. Debate coaches love attention and love being in the media. The reason they are trusted on these matters is because of one of the most basic and oldest fallacies in the world – equivocation.

Aristotle identified equivocation as one of his “Sophistic Refutations” – a work that was read by philosophers and others as a way of discounting the techniques of the Sophists, but it’s not clear that he meant to do that. Equivocation as a fallacy is when you use a word when you know that the audience will think of it with a different definition than you have.

Debate coaches, when they are asked by the media about these election debates use the term “debate” meaning that what we are about to see in the political debate is the same as what the college and high school debate coaches do. The debate coaches never correct them.

They never attempt to complicate the relationship between what they do and what we see in election debates. They also never attempt to really disambiguate what they do from political debate in a way that would benefit them in terms of why they should be heard; why their opinion on the debate matters. They just pretend that what they are familiar with is exactly what we see in the national political debates.

This is a huge missed opportunity. Debate coaches could use this moment to promote what they do, an attempt to improve national debate quality. They could also speak to how terrible the debates are for anyone looking to make a decision using them as a guide. They could also use the gap between what they do and what we see as evidence that debate education is necessary, powerful, and valuable to improve the quality of discourse in the United States.

An easy way in, that you’ll never hear a debate coach say in the media would be to talk about how both participants in the debate would have record low scores in a competition with high school or university students. They wouldn’t even move the needle. The discourse we get from the political sphere is abysmal compared to what the nation’s young people expect as a minimal buy in for being a decent debate speech.

You won’t hear that. You’ll hear self-serving discourse from these coaches, pretending that they are experts on these terrible political debates. They will only use the opportunity to make themselves look like experts, and they will only share their own personal political opinions. This doesn’t help Americans or other viewers understand the debate, but definitely fits in with a number of other journalists or commentators who share their views. What’s missed is the opportunity to educate people on the understanding of debate. There are different ways to structure and set up debates, and not all debates are equal. A higher standard of debate is what is on the line, and these selfish people can’t be bothered to tell the journalists that the model is bad and there could be a better one.