Step back from all the discussion about Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald Trump, debate preparations, microphones, and all the rest. Start with a basic question: How did the first, and possibly only, Harris-Trump debate become an ABC News debate?
The answer is that President Joe Biden picked ABC because he thought it offered him the friendliest and most advantageous forum in which to debate Trump. Of course, he picked CNN, too, and while CNN was not unfriendly to Biden, the debate will be remembered for the president’s vivid, real-time display of his senescence more than for anything the CNN moderators did.
It happened quickly in May, when Biden cockily challenged Trump to two debates. “Donald Trump lost two debates to me in 2020, and since then, he hasn’t shown up for a debate,” Biden said in a video released on May 15. “Now, he is acting like he wants to debate me again. Well, make my day, pal. I’ll even do it twice.”
Biden proposed two debates, laying out conditions that ruled out the possibility of Fox News handling either debate. The Biden campaign quickly settled on CNN for the first debate, scheduled for June 27, and ABC for the second, scheduled for Sept. 10.
Given Biden’s mental and physical decline, the “make my day” challenge had to be the dumbest move ever made by a presidential candidate. Trump sensed that Biden didn’t really want to debate, that Biden was offering two debates to Trump on terms that Biden believed Trump would find unacceptable and refuse. Then, Biden could accuse Trump of being too chicken to debate.
Trump decided to call Biden’s bluff and quickly accept both debates. “I am ready and willing to debate Crooked Joe at the two proposed times in June and September,” Trump wrote on Truth Social the same day Biden issued his challenge. Saying there should also be more debates, Trump added, “Just tell me when, I’ll be there. Let’s get ready to rumble!!!”
Trump knew that neither CNN nor ABC was friendly territory, but he believed that Biden just wasn’t up to debating, so the network didn’t really matter. The debates were on, and Biden rolled toward disaster on June 27. (In the end, Trump praised the CNN moderators’ fairness.) By the end of July, Biden was out, pushed to withdraw from the race by a secretive group of powerful Democratic Party powerbrokers. Harris was instantly chosen as his successor.
Harris quickly embraced the ABC debate for the same reason Biden proposed it — because it would be the friendliest and most advantageous forum for her candidacy. She claimed that Trump had already agreed to debate her on ABC on Sept. 10 and that if he did not, he would be “backing out” of a debate he had already accepted. It was a baseless claim, of course. Trump had agreed to debate Biden — “I am ready and willing to debate Crooked Joe” — and not Kamala Harris, who was not a candidate for president when Trump accepted Biden’s challenge.
Many in the media took up Harris’s framing of the situation, reporting that Trump might “back out” of a debate to which he never agreed. In any event, Trump eventually accepted ABC as the debate network. When he did, Harris then turned around and claimed that the rules of the debate should be changed to exclude a provision to mute a candidate’s microphone when he or she was not speaking. After weeks of wrangling, she appears to have lost that fight.
So, ABC it is. Will the network’s moderators conduct a straight-down-the-middle debate? Or will they conduct a debate more along the lines of their own daily coverage of the news? That’s unknown, but on the latter, ABC’s news coverage, look at a new report from the conservative Media Research Center.
“MRC analysts reviewed all 100 campaign stories that aired on ABC’s World News Tonight from the day Harris entered the race (July 21) through September 6, including weekends,” MRC wrote. “Our analysts found 25 clearly positive statements about Harris from reporters, anchors, voters, or other nonpartisan sources, with zero negative statements — none. That computes to a gravity-defying 100% positive spin score for the vice president. As for Trump, our analysts found just five clearly positive comments, vs. 66 negative statements, for a dismal 7% positive (93% negative) spin score.”
The MRC team explained that its analysts omitted “partisan comments, as well as ‘horse race’ assessments about the candidates’ poll standings and prospects.” Doing that meant that yes, ABC viewers did hear negative comments about Harris, but “all of them were from Trump, his campaign team, or other Republicans — never from reporters or nonpartisan sources.” With Trump, on the other hand, ABC voices supplied a lot of the negative comments.
The MRC report will not come as a surprise to anyone tracking media coverage during what even Harris partisans admitted was a period of extraordinarily positive treatment of the vice president’s new campaign. Biased, pro-Harris coverage certainly contributed to what came to be known as the Harris “sugar high” of rising polls and fawning news treatment.
There are now signs that the “sugar high” is wearing off, albeit slowly. Will it shoot back up or continue to abate? We’ll see what role the ABC debate plays in providing the answer.
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