Yesterday’s debate between the two candidates for the White House was different from the one in June – and not only because it was Kamala Harris instead of Joe Biden against Donald Trump. On yesterday’s telefight, there was live fact-checking by reporters, who corrected some of the false claims, especially Trump’s.
In particular, while CNN (which organized the first debate) had chosen not to have journalists intervene in any inaccuracies or untruths of the candidates, ABC and its moderators, David Muir and Lindsay Davis, yesterday directly and in real time challenged some of the statements made by Trump on abortion, immigration, the 2020 election and crime, practicing so-called fact checking a total of five times in the 90 minutes that the whole process lasted.
Dispute on live broadcast
So when Trump claimed that Democrats support “executing babies after they’re born,” as he accused Tim Walsh, Harris’ running mate, of being in favor of “ninth-month abortions,” journalist and moderator Davis intervenes to clarify that “there is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it is born.”
Muir also pressed Trump on his connection to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Capitol Hill — which he denies — but also on his belief that he had won the 2020 election.
Of course, moderators were not always able to step in to correct invalid claims. This, for example, happened when Trump made the baseless and outrageous claim that Haitian immigrants “eat pets … cats and dogs” in Springfield, Ohio. But after Trump finished his response, Muir shared a report from ABC News, which had since contacted the Springfield mayor.
“He told us there were no credible reports of pets being injured or abused by people in the immigrant community,” the moderator said, with Trump interrupting him to insist he had “seen people on TV saying, ‘my dog they took him and ate him”.
Debate about … debate
Muir and Davis are journalists with decades of experience covering US presidential elections. However, despite their admitted success in coordinating the discussion and meeting the deadlines, not everyone was happy with the outcome.
Republicans largely viewed the moderators as biased in favor of Harris because of their corrections to Trump.
The Republican candidate himself, in the same mood, shortly after leaving the stage in Philadelphia where the debate took place, wrote on the Truth Social platform that this was “my best debate, especially since it was THREE AGAINST ONE!”.
Prior to the telefight, ABC News had not explicitly ruled out fact checking. Rick Klein, the network’s director of political reporting, told the New York Times that as a network they were not committed to “control everything or nothing, either way … We’re there to facilitate a good, solid conversation, and that entails a lot of things in terms of asking questions, directing the conversation and making sure it’s civil.”
Instead, in the first debate, hosted by CNN, reporters Jake Tapper and Dana Bass moved to a format that put the onus on the candidates to challenge each other’s claims.
A presidential debate is “not the ideal venue for a live validation exercise,” CNN political director David Chalian told the Washington Post before the debate. Moderators were supposed to “clearly facilitate and mediate a discussion,” he added, “not participate.” CNN’s approach was praised by those who thought it best to keep the moderators “out of the fray.”
Others called it irresponsible and dangerous for CNN to allow the former president to lie so many times live, addressing 240 million voters without anyone correcting him.
For example, after the June phone call, CNN’s fact-checking service counted more than 30 false statements by Trump that day. In yesterday’s debate, the former president’s false claims reached 34 while Harris’s was only one.
#Elections #Debate #fact #checking #controversy #sparked
