ABC News Feels the Heat as Harris and Trump Ready for the Debate Stage | Analysis
With two months to go before the presidential election, the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is widely considered to be a toss up. But as they face off on Tuesday in their first and only presidential debate so far, they are expected to share at least some of the limelight with debate host ABC News.
The pressure will be on ABC “World News Tonight” anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis to keep the candidates on point as they moderate the 90-minute debate, which starts at 9 p.m. ET. It will air live on ABC and stream on ABC News Live, Disney+ and Hulu, and will be available for simulcast. It will also be televised or streamed by multiple media outlets.
Rick Klein, ABC’s political director, was noncommittal when asked about whether the moderators would fact-check the candidates, according to a recent report in The New York Times. “We’re not making a commitment to fact-checking everything, or fact-check nothing, in either direction,” he said, adding that ABC is there to facilitate a good debate.
“While the supporters and detractors of Trump and Harris tend to dominate social media, many less partisan Americans will tune in looking for basic information before casting a vote,” Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network and former editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, noted in a recent opinion piece for Poynter. “Debate moderators who don’t contradict the candidates in their lies and spin are doing these voters a disservice.”
Like the CNN-hosted debate between Trump and President Joe Biden in June, there will be no live audience in Philadelphia and the candidates’ mics will be muted unless it is their turn to speak. Those rules were groundbreaking in the June debate, which ended up being the beginning of the end for Biden, whose halting, confused performance that night ultimately led him to step out of the race in endorsement of Harris.
The lack of a live audience gives Trump and Harris more of a chance to dodge questions, just as both the Republican nominee and Biden did during the CNN debate, Patrick Stewart, author of “The Audience Decides: Applause-Cheering, Laughter, and Booing During Debates in the Trump Era,” told TheWrap.
CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, who moderated the June contest, were criticized by many media watchers and political operatives for not fact-checking Trump and Biden, although CNN and many other news outlets did so afterward.
In her piece for Poynter, Holan recounted, “While Biden meandered and wandered, saying things that either didn’t make sense or were hard to follow, Trump turned to his very long regular playlist of falsehoods about the economy, abortion, immigration and election fraud.” Tapper and Bash simply thanked the candidates and moved on to the next question, an approach that did little to enlighten the public, she said.
Bash, for her part, defended the decision not to fact-check live on air in a Friday interview with “Pod Save America,” saying, “If and when Donald Trump said something that wasn’t true … if we were to jump in, we would be active participants as if I was doing an interview or we would do in a town hall that we moderate when there’s not a political opponent there. But that was up to Joe Biden to do the, ‘Wait a minute.’”
Tuesday’s debate now creates an opening for ABC News, at a time when the decline of broadcast TV is accelerating and parent company Disney is embroiled in a bitter carriage dispute with satellite operator DirecTV that has kept Disney’s channels, including ABC and ESPN, dark on DirecTV for more than a week.
ABC already scored a coup when anchor George Stephanopoulos landed the first sit-down interview with Biden following the problematic CNN debate, which drew 8.5 million viewers.
Networks play an important role in shaping public perception during debates but not necessarily in the manner that most people assume, Stewart, who is also a political science professor at the University of Arkansas, said.
“The most important role that the networks can play,” he said, “is with the camera shots, making sure that they are fair, making sure they spend as much time as possible in the split screen so we can see the candidates’ faces.”
Research shows that having a side-by-side, split-screen view of the candidates throughout the debate is especially important in giving the general public the opportunity to see how candidates react to questions and comments from the opposition, he explained.
Their reaction is important because “it tells us who they are as people because, as politicians, they already know what they’re going to say – they’ve already said it thousands of times before,” Stewart continued. “They are practicing actors.”
A total of 51.27 million viewers tuned into the CNN debate, according to Nielsen data. That is down from the candidates’ first debate in 2020 that drew 73.1 million viewers and their second that drew roughly 63 million. But those totals were off considerably from Trump and Clinton’s first debate in 2016 in which 84 million viewers tuned in.
CNN said the June debate was the most watched non-sports program on TV so far this year. “More people watched the CNN presidential debate than any other CNN program in history,” the network said in a statement. CNN ranked first across broadcast and cable TV networks with 9.53 million viewers. Fox News ranked second with 9.276 million viewers, followed by ABC News with 9.21 million viewers and MSNBC’s 4.122 million, CNN said.
Tight race
A lot has happened quickly for the Democrats since the CNN debate. The president withdrew from the race on July 21 and endorsed Harris to replace him at the top of the ticket. The vice president secured enough votes at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) to become the party’s nominee, selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate and formally accepted the nomination on Aug. 22.
On the Republican side, Trump chose U.S. Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate on July 15 and then accepted his party’s nomination.
Tuesday’s ABC debate will be another reset for the 2024 campaign. While it is unlikely to change voters’ opinions of Trump, “the big question is whether it impacts the way voters perceive Harris,” Amy Walter, publisher and editor-in-chief of the The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, said in a recent tweet.
According to a national New York Times/Siena College poll of 1,695 registered voters last week, Harris would lag Trump by one percentage point (47% vs. 48% with a margin of error plus/minus 2.8 pts.) if the election were held today.
A separate CBS News/YouGov survey of registered voters also last week has Harris ahead of Trump in the battleground states of Michigan (50% vs. 49%) and Wisconsin (51% vs. 49%) with the candidates tied in Pennsylvania.
CBS is scheduled to hold the next debate, which will pit vice presidential candidates Vance against Walz, on Oct. 1. CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell and Face the Nation anchor Margaret Brennan are scheduled to moderate.
In the meantime, early voting begins soon. Mail-in ballots are slated to be sent to voters in Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and several other states starting this month.
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