The verdict is in on last night's ABC News presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
It was cheating. It was biased. It was a joke.
Hosts Lindsey Davis and David Muir asked Trump lengthy and hostile questions, but hurled slow question after slow question at Harris, “fact-checking” Trump's statements multiple times for accuracy but missing Harris' repeated lies without even “fact-checking” them once.
But that's not surprising, given the findings of the Media Research Center's NewsBusters website: ABC's coverage of Trump, particularly by Muir, is nearly 100% negative, and its coverage of Harris is 100% positive.
Experts Agree on Bias
Two experts who sat down with Dr. Phil at a post-debate town hall meeting said the doctor's body language and questions were biased.
“Look at their body language,” expert Greg Hartley told TV psychiatrists.
Look at the expressions on people's faces when they see Trump – their prejudice against him is clearly visible on their faces.
Hartley also said the hosts asked Harris easy questions and Trump more hostile ones.
“That feels like bias to me,” he said. “I'd like them to explain why that's not a bias situation.”
Expert Scott Rouse noted that the moderator frequently interrupted Trump, preventing him from finishing his answers, and that the volume of Trump's microphone was too loud, making him sound more aggressive.
“He sounded a little loud to me,” Rouse said, “so I don't know if it was a ploy to make him seem more aggressive, but he was pretty loud.”
Dr. Phil read out a list of questions that showed their obvious bias.
Glenn Greenwald's take
“The structure and the way this debate was conducted was mind-blowing, because I understood based on the structure that it was going to be exactly like the first CNN debate,” Glenn Greenwald said in a system update after the debate.
Fact Check… Or Not?
Greenwald thought the CNN debate with Joe Biden was fair because each candidate was given equal time and the network made no attempt to fact-check either candidate in real time. He said the ABC hosts should have checked all of the candidates' claims, or not at all, because “people are influenced by their own biases, their own preconceived notions of issues and candidates.”
The only fact-check, he said, was that Davis and Muir had “direct discussions” with Trump, where they “constantly said after Donald Trump finished speaking, 'That's not true, what you said is inaccurate, what you said is false.'”
After Trump fired back, the hosts' arguments got more heated. Harris, meanwhile, had an easier time, Greenwald continued, as the hosts never questioned anything she said.
The hosts never pointed out to Kamala Harris that anything she said was out of context, misleading, false, exaggerated or otherwise untrue. And that's not because Kamala Harris spoke for 90 minutes without making a false statement; she had countless false statements that could and should have been fact-checked.
Greenwald noted that Harris lied about Trump's stance on IVF, Trump's comments about the 2017 “Unite the Right Rally” in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Trump's claim that Biden left the U.S. with the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression.
Arguing with Trump and letting Harris escape
He said the hosts were “blatant” about it, and that they were “arguing” with the former president.
Whenever Trump said something, they would always make a digression saying he didn't answer the question, or that his words were taken out of context, etc. They never did that with Kamala Harris, even though she refused to answer most of the times she was directly asked the question.
On that note, he noted, she avoided answering a question about the Biden administration's disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, an operation in which 13 Americans died.
Other questions, particularly the one about abortion, came from a left-wing perspective. “And rightly so, because they hate Donald Trump and his conservatism. It's his anti-establishment populism that they feel threatened by,” he said.
Given that ABC is headed by former Clinton mobster George Stephanopoulos, “it was pretty predictable what was going to happen,” Greenwald continued.
But “the structure of the debate, including the way the questions were asked, was clearly designed to favor her,” he said.
It was as if they knew what Trump was going to say, even on issues like immigration and inflation, and every question was designed to anticipate and sort of negate his response, and then they asked the question. … It was often something like, “Why should women trust President Trump?” and then they turned to Kamala Harris and asked, “Do you have anything to say about that?”
Hugh Hewitt
Commentator Hugh Hewitt said something similar.
Trump lost the debate but “won the war,” he said, and “ABC News lost the most. They were very biased. It was probably the worst presidential debate of all time.”
The hosts “framed every question to help Kamala Harris,” he said.
It's as if Bob Iger, the head of Disney, which owns ABC, sent memos and calls to the head of ABC, and then the same thing happened from ABC to ABC News to David Muir and Lindsey Davis. Kill it. Throw it at Harris. Kill Trump. Stop Trump. And that went on for a full hour and a half.
Muir's dislike of Trump
The day before the debate, NewsBusters accurately predicted how ABC News and its moderators would handle the debate.
“Harris could not have chosen a more amicable setting for their first meeting,” the website reported.
Of the three major networks,
ABC's “World News Tonight,” run by debate moderator David Muir, was the most favorable toward Harris and the most hostile toward Trump.
News programs' coverage of Harris was 100 percent positive, while their coverage of Trump was 93 percent negative.
Viewers of ABC's World News Tonight have certainly heard negative comments about Harris over the past six and a half weeks, but they have all come from Trump, his campaign or other Republicans — not reporters or nonpartisan sources.
At the same time, while our spin scores similarly exclude all Democratic soundbites about the Republican candidate, ABC reporters and anchors gave their coverage of the former president a very negative spin, either by jumping in to criticize Trump himself or by airing negative commentary from nonpartisan sources.
All of this raises a natural question: Why did Trump and his cronies agree to a debate knowing it was rigged?
