The September 10th Presidential debate resulted with two main stories. Depending on the side you are one you are either laughing and joking about how former President Trump made comments about pets being eaten in Springfield, Ohio and how the press and Springfield government have said this is not true… or you are talking about how blatantly biased the moderators were.
I suppose some people may be discussing VP Harris’s performance, but for the most part from what I have seen the commentary surrounds either this seemingly ridiculous story which nobody wants to believe, or the otherwise obvious one-sidedness of the media in their coverage. This post will focus on the latter, but I may return to the former in another discussion at a later date.
What is amusing to me is the number of people who outright reject the idea that the moderators were biased in their approach. Take this guy’s response to Megyn Kelly.
Apparently we are to believe the caricature of reality that Donald Trump is always a liar, and that Vice President Kamala Harris is always a truth teller.
The fact is, Donald Trump did get facts and figures wrong. That happens when talking and debating sometimes but is not indicative of policy nor the overall message of the argument. Now as it is the press has a long history of taking things out of context with former PResident Trump, hell it took Snopes years to admit that Trump was not saying there were good people on both sides implying that there were good racists.
This very same lie was repeated by Vice President Harris, and President Biden in both debates. It is possible they believe the lie, I know many people who do. Those people who repeat this mistaken belief are not lying, they are repeating misinformation. The problem is the Press is lying, they knew it was a lie in the beginning, and it took years for them to start correcting the record.
We can give the President and Vice President a pass assuming they don’t know the truth about this. There was no need for staff to brief them on the truth about it, and the media has been happy to repeat the lie ever since they invented it.
But no former President did not say that white supremicists were “Very-Fine people” (https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-very-fine-people/), it just is not true.
Here is the problem with stuff like this, if the Press is going to provide fact checking they need provide it for both sides. That means they need to be prepared, both for the questions they plan on asking both candidates, and for the charges they will likely hear made by the candidates.
Apparently David Muir and Linsey Davis were not concerned with preparation for both sides, as they seemed to only have information for the Trump campaign. It is amazing they had already talked to the city manager for Springfield, Ohio, considering the news was incredibly recent. That is really impressive on their part.
It is abysmal though that they didn’t bother to run a fact check on the “Very-Fine people” lie. They knew this was going to come up, or at least should have known it would. It came up in the first debate, and in the first debate Trump cited the snopes piece that I linked earlier and do so again now https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-very-fine-people/. This was guaranteed to come up. It was a component of the press lie about Trump for years, they should have been prepared.
But then we get to the bigger issue. When Vice President Harris claimed
“VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Well, I will tell you, I agreed with President Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan. Four presidents said they would, and Joe Biden did. And as a result, America’s taxpayers are not paying the $300 million a day we were paying for that endless war. And as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world, the first time this century. But let’s understand how we got to where we are. Donald Trump when he was president negotiated one of the weakest deals you can imagine. He calls himself a dealmaker. Even his national security adviser said it was a weak, terrible deal. And here’s how it went down. He bypassed the Afghan government. He negotiated directly with a terrorist organization called the Taliban. The negotiation involved the Taliban getting 5,000 terrorists, Taliban terrorists released.”
as per the transcript (thanks MSNBC, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/read-the-full-transcript-of-abc-news-presidential-debate-between-harris-and-trump/ar-AA1qmoTQ?ocid=BingNewsSerp#image=1) and my own ears
When Mr Morgan J. Freeman poses the question “Hi @megynkelly — Kindly name one thing Kamala said that ABC should ahve fact-checked. I’ll wait.” (https://x.com/mjfree/status/1833942406569349188).
He demonstrated the lack of knowledge many have about just how bad the coverage has been here.
This lack of knowledge by a citizen is one thing, but by the media is another thing altogether. It is also something that both David Muir and Linsey Davis should have been intimately familiar with.
They asked VP Harris about her position with the Afghanistan withdrawal and the military. It was bound to come up. Considering that President Biden made a similar statement in the first debate it should have been checked afterward anyway. Regardless David Muir and Linsey Davis should have been ready.
Now I’m not going to say Vice President Harris was lying directly here. As I said earlier with the Charlottesville lie, its possible that the Vice President believes this. The lie is what the press have done with it, that is the so-called “fake news”. If the Press has one job to do it is to look for the objective truth, and when it conflicts with the facts of the existing story they should address it.
In a debate, that is not the role of the press though. They should be researching and coming up questions to ask the candidates, but they should not be prepared to answer or fact check them at all. Why? Well we learned that lesson in 2012 when Candy Crowley injected herself into the debate? People were writing about the 2012 debate going into the one this summer between President Biden and Former President Trump https://thespectator.com/politics/cnn-learned-anything-debate-moderating-candy-crowley/ precisely because of how badly she did the moderation. It was a tipping point for CNN’s loss of credibility, they only went downhill from there. This summer CNN redeemed itself much to the surprise of everyone on the right and in the middle.
Fact checking live in a debate is not the moderator’s job. It is the job of the two candidates to do that. They are the ones who are trying to get their message to the potential voters. The moderators and the press can fact check everything they want later.
So lets address that quote from Vice President Harris. Again she said the following.
“VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Well, I will tell you, I agreed with President Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan. Four presidents said they would, and Joe Biden did. And as a result, America’s taxpayers are not paying the $300 million a day we were paying for that endless war. And as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world, the first time this century. But let’s understand how we got to where we are. Donald Trump when he was president negotiated one of the weakest deals you can imagine. He calls himself a dealmaker. Even his national security adviser said it was a weak, terrible deal. And here’s how it went down. He bypassed the Afghan government. He negotiated directly with a terrorist organization called the Taliban. The negotiation involved the Taliban getting 5,000 terrorists, Taliban terrorists released.”
Being charitable, the Vice President is either mis-speaking, or forgetful, or uninformed. Maybe she was unaware about the Sailors and Marines getting targeted by the Houthis. Maybe she was unaware that we have people at Al Asad Air Base. Maybe she was unaware that the base was rocketed in AUGUST of this year.
Maybe she didn’t know at all.
But do you know who did know?
Linsey Davis, that is freaking who knew! She knew! She reported the story on the air on August 5th! She knew that one for an absolute fact!
She knew. There is no way she didn’t know it. There wouldn’t even be any prep work required on her part because she already read the damn thing on the air. It came out of her damn mouth on national news just the previous month. That was 37 days before the debate. You can’t tell me that she forgot about it in that amount of time. No freaking way. If she did she is in the wrong business completely.
Absolutely Shameless
Now as I said I don’t believe that the moderators in a debate should be fact checking the candidates. They should press them to get an answer if they are dodging, but fact checking no. However, when you have decided to go all in and attempt to fact check one candidate at every turn, well then you damn well better do the same with the other candidate too. And sure as shit if you are going to do that, you should absolutely speak up when something so blatantly false, that you yourself reported to the American people is being told that is simply untrue.
Again that is not the fault of Vice President Harris. People can reach their own conclusions as to why she would say something that was so blatantly untrue. There are very reasonable explanations for that misrepresentation of the facts on her part.
Linsey Davis though. She and David Muir are absolute jokes at this point and nobody should be following the reporting of ABC at all after their abysmal attempt to influence the election through one sided fact checking and overall one-sided moderation of the debate.
I would not be surprised if ABC, Disney, and Hulu all saw a mass exodus of subscribers and viewership. This failure is beyond comparison. Candy Crowley you are no longer the worst moderator in history, CNN you are no longer the worst media organization covering the news. A new king and queen have been crowned. Nobody, and I mean nobody should take anything that Linsey Davis says as truth ever again after that debate. She has revealed her level of journalistic integrity, and it is zilch.
