Fox And CNN Help Romney Change The Debate

Fox News and CNN hosts are helping the Romney campaign change the narrative away from his controversial tenure at Bain Capital and his lack of transparency concerning his tax returns after Congressman Paul Ryan was announced as his running mate, and just a day after Mitt Romney asked that his business and tax history be off-limits.

On Friday, NBC News released an excerpt from an interview senior political reporter Chuck Todd conducted with Romney, where Romney said:

[O]ur campaign would be -- helped immensely if we had an agreement between both campaigns that we were only going to talk about issues and that attacks based upon -- business or family or taxes or things of that nature...these are a diversion.

Recent polling shows that these issues matter to voters. A CNN poll released on Thursday found that 63 percent of those polled think Romney should release tax returns from additional years - including 67 percent of independents. And according to The New York Times, several polls “found that more voters say Mr. Romney's experience was too focused on making profits at Bain Capital, the private equity firm he led, rather than the kind of experience that would help create jobs.”

Saturday morning, CNN's Candy Crowley said that what “the Romney campaign wants to do” with the Paul Ryan announcement is “stop talking about tax returns, they want to stop talking about Bain.” And several Fox and CNN employees did just that.