Tuesday’s presidential debate was different from the first one of this election cycle — and not just because a new candidate faced off with former president Donald Trump.
By Elahe Izadi
But the moderators during Tuesday’s debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, hosted by ABC News, fact-checked or clarified statements made by Trump five times. They did not issue any fact checks for statements made by Harris.
That approach resulted in blowback by conservative watchers and the Trump campaign itself. “You had moderators live rebutting as if they’re on the team together,” Trump spokesman Brian Hughes told reporters after the debate.
Trump was so displeased with ABC’s handling of the debate that, during a Fox News interview the following morning, he said the network’s broadcast license should be revoked over it.
A spokesperson for ABC News did not return The Washington Post’s request for comment.
Both candidates made about 50 claims, the majority of which were made by Trump, according to a tally being kept by The Post’s Fact Checker. Trump spoke for about six minutes more than Harris, according to a New York Times tracker.
And a “preliminary” count by CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale late Tuesday night tallied at least 33 false claims made by Trump and at least one made by Harris. “I don’t have time to run through each specific false Trump claim,” Dale said on air late Tuesday night.
Before the debate, ABC News did not rule out fact-checking. Rick Klein, ABC News’s political director, told the New York Times in an interview over the weekend that they weren’t committing “to fact-check everything, or fact-check nothing, in either direction. We’re there to keep a conversation going, and to facilitate a good solid debate, and that entails a lot of things in terms of asking questions, moving the conversation along, making sure that it’s civilized.”
But the first presidential debate, hosted by CNN, featured a debate format that put the onus on the candidates to push back and fact-check each other.
A debate “is not the ideal venue for a live fact-checking exercise,” CNN political director David Chalian told The Post before the debate. The moderators were “to plainly facilitate and moderate a debate,” he added, “... not to be a participant.”
In the CNN debate, President Joe Biden struggled to push back on Trump, in what has since been viewed as a disastrous debate performance.
