ABC’s Moderators Failed to Fact-Check Kamala Harris
This week’s first and possibly only debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump was not nearly as consequential as the June debate, which ended President Joe Biden’s political career. It also differed in another key way: The moderation was incredibly one-sided and unfair.
This was not true of the previous debate, between Biden and Trump. CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash asked questions but did not interrupt or attempt to fact-check the candidates—they left that to Trump and Biden. Such an approach is preferable; politicians make so many incorrect statements that if the moderators really felt the need to intervene every single time, debates would devolve into showdowns between the moderators and each candidate, which isn’t the point. There are also frequent examples of moderators asserting that a given claim is abjectly false when it may be complicated, ambiguous, or a case where reasonable minds disagree.
ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis thrice followed a remark by Trump with an attempt to fact-check him. These fact-checks introduced valid, conflicting information; Trump said violence in the U.S. was out of control and the moderators pointed to FBI data that contradicts this, and Trump said that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets—a completely erroneous claim.
But when Harris made statements that could have been fact-checked, the moderators declined to do so.
Harris said that Trump had threatened there would be a “bloodbath” if he lost the election, and Harris implied that this was a threat of actual political violence; the moderators could have pointed out that Trump was describing the state of the economy under prospective progressive governance. Harris also said there were currently no U.S. military service members in active combat zones; this is flatly untrue, as American troops are currently serving in informal war zones in places like Iraq and Syria.
Then there was bias reflected in the kinds of questions the candidates were asked. Trump was deservedly grilled on his appalling conduct surrounding the 2020–2021 presidential transition, and comments he made about Harris’ race. Meanwhile, Harris fielded zero questions about her complicity in the vast cover-up of Biden’s cognitive decline and infirmity. When she declined to give specific reasons for her flip-flopping on fracking—or even concede that she has flip-flopped—the moderators did not follow up.
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