While the much-anticipated ABC News presidential debate between GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has come and gone, the debate over how it was handled is still raging.
The terms that were agreed upon by the candidates, with some reluctance from the Harris campaign, were to largely follow the CNN model from June. That included having the mic muted when the other candidate was speaking and no fact-checks from the moderators for either of them.
A sticking point for the Harris team going into the debate was not wanting the mics muted. Though they initially stood their ground and said they were going to follow CNN’s format, just hours before the debate, ABC News was reportedly considering allowing for the mics to be unmuted if they felt the discussion/debate allowed for it.
As it turns out, that’s exactly what happened, something that Harris used to her advantage during the oftentimes contentious event.
Further, moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis quickly turned the debate into a three-on-one, with both Muir and Davis “fact-checking” Trump repeatedly (and sometimes with incorrect information) while ignoring outright falsehoods told by Harris throughout the course of the debate.
Though Harris started out the debate wobbly, refusing to answer a question central to this race considering she’s the current vice president — “Do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?” — it didn’t take long for her to figure out how one-sided the moderators were going to be.
Naturally, she settled in at that point with scripted lines on the ready, likely full well knowing she’d have full rein of the evening.
While some pundits have argued that Trump should have been prepared for the ambush, the point remains that the debate shouldn’t have played out as it did, in the interest of the public’s trust.
If ABC News had planned all along to do fact-checks of both candidates, that would have been one thing.
But all the so-called fact-checks were one-sided, which did a disservice to voters who deserved a fair and balanced debate, not yet another debacle with the scale being tipped in favor of one of the candidates, as happened during the infamous Candy Crowley/Mitt Romney moment from the 2012 presidential campaign.
And yet one of the co-moderators seemed proud of what they had pulled off.
During a post-debate interview with the Los Angeles Times, Linsey Davis said the decision was made to fact-check Trump because of how the CNN debate played out.
“People were concerned that statements were allowed to just hang and not (be) disputed by the candidate (President Joe) Biden, at the time, or the moderators,” she told the LA Times.
That sounded an awful lot like saying the quiet part out loud, that Davis did not want the same thing happening to Harris that happened to Biden, where the latter’s disastrous June debate performance was the catalyst for Democrats talking him into exiting the presidential race a few weeks later.
If the media outlets who host these things want to keep doing so, that’s fine. But no Republican presidential candidate or nominee should participate in them again until they negotiate ironclad assurances that the favorites game will not be played.
It’s a tall order, to be sure, considering the wildly partisan makeup of the mainstream media. But debates are an important part of the process of people making up their minds about the candidates, so hopefully this can get sorted out by 2028.
Because, unfortunately, all hope on this front for 2024 is lost.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
