September 11, 2024 - 7:40am
It’s worth wondering whether last night’s presidential debate was the last we’ll ever see on traditional media.
Vice President Kamala Harris started strong. She tacked to the centre, riffing on the lab leak and small businesses and tax cuts for billionaires — all without serving up one of her signature word salads. Harris also managed to set traps for Donald Trump, baiting him, for example, into quibbling over crowds at his rallies when he could have been hitting her on immigration.
She sounded serious and appeared likeable. For a woman whose approval ratings were lower than Dick Cheney’s not long ago, that’s a feat. Trump, by contrast, seemed angry. As the debate wore on, however, that anger seemed increasingly justified.
Moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis of ABC News made the controversial decision to perform fact checks of the candidates in real time. Not once did they check a claim from Harris. All four of the moderators’ live corrections were made against Trump, some of which were highly subjective.
Of course, that’s why many moderators — including Jake Tapper and Dana Bash in June — choose to trust that voters can check facts on their own. Campaigns are built on exaggerations. Nobody is happy about it, but it’s true of both Republicans and Democrats. While Trump is uniquely freewheeling, to say the very least, Harris provided plenty of openings for the moderators to offer just one easy correction.
She repeated a claim about the racist Charlottesville rally that even Snopes debunked. What about her implication that Trump’s “bloodbath” comment was related to something other than the auto industry? Her claims on late-term abortion? (Davis hit Trump with a somewhat dubious fact check on that one.)
During Tuesday’s debate, conservatives immediately invoked the notorious decision by Candy Crowley in 2012 to incorrectly fact-check Mitt Romney during a debate with Barack Obama. “Tonight’s moderators made Candy Crowley look fair,” Sean Spicer, Trump’s former press secretary, posted on X. Ann Coulter wrote: “Trump is having to fight all three other people on stage. I’ve never seen such an unfair debate. This is worse than Candy Crowley ‘correcting’ Romney — and then admitting she was wrong … hours after the debate.”
Why did Republicans agree to it in the first place? Trump-era conservatives have been calling on the RNC to starve legacy networks of their lucrative access to debates. The momentum became so strong that former Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel led the party’s decision to withdraw from the storied Commission on Presidential Debates. Back in November, Vivek Ramaswamy used part of his time in a primary debate to critique the format. “This should be Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan and Elon Musk,” he said on NBC. “We’d have 10 times the viewership asking questions that GOP primary voters actually care about, bringing more people into our party.”
More than a decade after the Crowley dust-up, Republicans clearly have permission from their voters to ditch the legacy media. Independents? Their trust in the press is close to a record low. The eruption of independent journalists leaves both parties with no shortage of technically feasible alternatives.
Even Trump himself — an undisputed master of television — explained recently on Lex Fridman’s podcast: “From a political standpoint, you have to find out what people are doing, what they’re watching and you have to get on.”
“I just see that these platforms are starting to dominate — they’re getting very big numbers,” he said. “I did Spaces with Elon and they got numbers like nobody’s ever heard before. So you wouldn’t do that on radio. You wouldn’t do those numbers, no matter how good a show, you wouldn’t do those numbers on radio; you wouldn’t do on television.”
There were two losers last night: Trump and ABC News. Because the former president avoided an outright disaster, it’s likely ABC will suffer much more in the long run. So will this be the last time we see both candidates duke it out on a major network? Harris is already demanding a second debate in October. Trump, for his part, responded to the challenge on Truth Social by saying his opponent “is going around wanting another Debate because she lost so badly”.
If ever there were a time for the GOP to break up with the networks, it’d be now. But as one Republican strategist told me early this morning: “ABC News to Republicans is the ex-girlfriend you drunkenly text. You know you shouldn’t do it, but you do it anyways and regret it immediately.”
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