Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist and author of “Presidential Communication and Character: White House News Management from Clinton and Cable to Twitter and Trump,” argued in favor of more open-ended questions. “The effort to provoke conflict went far overboard,” he said. “A more useful approach would be to focus more extensively on the range of issues that the next president has to contend with.”

In Baiting Candidates and Stoking Conflict, Did CNN’s Presidential Debates Go Too Far? (Time.com)