Tuesday’s ABC News presidential debate offered plenty of spicy sound bites, from Donald Trump declaring, of his opponent, “She is Biden” to Kamala Harris telling the former President that Vladimir Putin would “eat you for lunch.” Yet for all the rhetorical flourishes and far-fetched assertions, one of the night’s most memorable—and crucial—utterances was a statement of the obvious: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”
I can’t imagine that many minds were blown by the revelation that homicide is a crime across the United States. What mattered was the speaker—co-moderator and ABC News Live Prime anchor Linsey Davis—and what she was responding to: Trump’s insistence that Democrats support executing babies after live births. This hysterical mischaracterization of pro-choice policy is among his favorite refrains. He performed a version of it at the first presidential debate of the current election cycle. But this time was different, and not just because Trump was faced with a new opponent who was quite a bit more eloquent on the subject of reproductive rights. Whereas the moderators of the earlier debate, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, faced widespread criticism for letting such flagrant falsehoods go uncorrected, Davis and her fellow moderator, World News Tonight host David Muir, repeatedly fact-checked responses in real time and asked follow-up questions when necessary. While it’s unlikely to get as much attention as the vibe shift Harris brought to the debate stage, their efforts went a long way toward keeping the proceedings honest.
Davis and Muir’s fact-checks were sporadic but effective, tamping down Trump’s most egregious inventions. His repetition of a racist and xenophobic conspiracy theory about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio—“They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there”—got a quick correction. In apparent anticipation of this talking point, ABC News had contacted Springfield’s city manager, who, Muir told viewers, had received “no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.” When Trump insisted he was being “sarcastic” in instances when he’d appeared to admit to having lost the 2020 election, Muir pushed back, noting that he’d reviewed tapes of some of those remarks and “didn’t detect the sarcasm.” When Trump said, “Crime in this country is through the roof” due to an influx of migrants, Muir quickly corrected him, citing the FBI as his source.
The moderators didn’t just call out Trump’s fabrications, either. They pressed both candidates, confronting them with their own past words, on issues they might have preferred to dodge. Harris had to clarify a handful of conflicting or ambiguous statements she’d made, over the years, on such divisive issues as fracking and the war in Gaza. When Trump dodged the question of whether he had regrets over his behavior on Jan. 6, 2021, Muir asked it again.
The moderation wasn’t perfect; no live telecast ever is. Sometimes Davis and Muir, who had the ability to mute both candidates’ mics when they didn’t have the floor, allowed responses to ramble on for too long or indulged Trump and Harris in excessive cross-talk. We shouldn’t get too carried away, either, in praising the moderators for doing their jobs. Fact-checking, following up, and holding candidates accountable for past statements are the bare minimum that news organizations hosting televised presidential debates must do to ensure that such spectacles are useful to—rather than just mildly entertaining meme fodder for—the American public. That accountability is what justifies the platforming of politicians with a track record of lying and separates rigorous news coverage from free, prime-time publicity. Anything less would be journalistic malpractice.
