Breakfast Meeting: A Moderator\'s Lot Is Not a Happy One

You can't please everyone, and that is never more true than when you are moderating a presidential debate. Candy Crowley of CNN discovered that on Tuesday night when she served as master of ceremonies for Round II between President Obama and Mitt Romney. Ms. Crowley tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to keep the candidates within the guidelines of the debate's format, and was criticized by conservative commentators for seeming to favor President Obama, especially when she fact-checked an assertion Mr. Romney made about Mr. Obama's handling of the attack in Libya last month.

Ross Douthat wrote in The Times that “she seemed to be taking sides against him,” inappropriately, at that moment, and even the left-leaning Huffington Post pointed out the significance of the incident.

But Dylan Byers said on Politico that she basically had an impossible job, trying to contain two candidates intent on breaking the rules and ignoring her. And Nicholas Kristof succinctly defen ded Ms. Crowley with a remark on Twitter that criticized the candidates for the way they mostly trampled on her attempts to guide the debate. “Since both candidates are trying to convince voters that they respect women, they might start by respecting Candy Crowley,” he wrote.

One Booker Prize is a distinguished honor for a fiction writer, and to win two is extremely rare. Two in four years might seem downright greedy, except that there was little disagreement on Tuesday. Sarah Lyall writes in The Times that Hilary Mantel had written an exceptional novel in “Bring Up the Bodies.” She won Britain's distinguished Man Booker Prize for that work, the second in a trilogy about Oliver Cromwell, after winning a first Booker in 2009 for the first installment, “Wolf Hall.”

Rupert Murdoch continued to be contrite on Tuesday for the phone-hacking scandal that has besieged News Corporation the last 15 months, but that does not mean he was ready to embrace suggesti ons for significant changes at his company. At the annual shareholder meeting, Ben Sisario writes in The Times, all of the company's 14 proposed board members were elected, and several proposals for restructuring were defeated, including one to eliminate the dual-stock structure that ensures Murdoch family control.

Google's issues regarding the privacy of its users was in the spotlight again on Tuesday, when European data collection agencies urged the company to modify its policies. The goal, Kevin O'Brien and Eric Pfanner write in The Times, is to ensure that users have a clear understanding of what information about them is being collected.