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A Debate Fiasco for Both Candidates—And This Nation
This is what we should expect from a debate "moderated" by a corporate news outlet.
Jun 30, 2024
It was, of course, not a presidential debate. Not a surprise. Trump came in ready to repeat what he tells audiences at his rallies – raging, lying by the microminute, promising perfection and spewing hate at Biden. Biden – flustered, bumbling at times, stumbling over facts, at least tried to answer specific questions from the moderators – Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. At least eight times, Trump brushed aside their questions and repeated his previous flailing tirades against Biden. It is a wonder Trump didn’t slurp saliva along with his sneering arrogance.
Democratic operatives were aghast during and after the merciful end of this 90-minute look/see by an estimated 51 million viewers. Biden prepared for over a week with his debate advisors and probably was so overprepared as to be tightly wound. Also, he had a cold which he should have noted at the outset to explain his weak tone of voice.
The moderators were forewarned about Trump trying to take over the show. They cut the mics of each candidate while the other was talking. Trump adjusted. He leapfrogged their questions and bellowed without ever being told: “Mr. Trump, you are not answering the questions just addressed to you.”
CNN correctly said beforehand that the moderators were not going to interrupt with any fact-checking, no matter how wild and crazy. As a result, the unfurled, unstable, disjointed man from Mar-a-Largo kept doing himself in, mitigating Biden’s staggering failure to deliver the most obvious rebuttals, especially on the issues of “democracy” and “climate.”
All the questions asked by the moderators were predictable by the candidates and their staff. That is how deep is the ditto nature of the mass media. Earlier the Washington Post asked sixteen of its opinion columnists to offer one policy question for the presidential debate. The moderators pretty much covered the questions asked. None of the sixteen columnists mentioned the corporate crime wave, the plight of worker exploitation (e.g., frozen minimum wage, workplace health/safety casualties, and anti-labor laws), massive corporate welfare giveaways, corporate tax reform, the global arms race or widespread abuses of consumers in many marketplace sectors.
Most prominently, the super-dominant power of giant corporations over our government, politics, economy, culture, and our children’s future never occurred to these savvy observers of what’s really going on in America.
Back to Biden’s collapse. Long-time Democratic Party loyalist, exhorter and critic, Robert Kuttner repeated his demand that Biden step aside. He elaborated: “With Biden heading the ticket, Democrats will likely lose the House, Senate, state legislatures and governorships, and down-ballot races all the way to school board, as well as the presidency.” I’ve known Kuttner for years. He rarely panics to this extent. He added that, “In coming days, the media echo chamber, which for once has it right, will keep reinforcing the depth of Biden’s defeat and the story of utter panic among Democratic officials, strategists, and donors. That will be self-enforcing.”
The vast majority of actual voters have already made up their minds. The rest will be treated with billions of dollars of advertising featuring selections from both Biden and Trump’s deliveries. What may save Biden, whose team asked for this early Debate, were the ravings and pathological lying of dangerous, dictatorial Donald. (See the Association Press Debate Fact Check).
There was little daylight between Biden and Trump on militarism, Empire, genocide and a devouring, bloated military budget. But domestically, Biden could have exposed Trump as an abject tool of the worst of Big Business and Wall Street over Main Street, contrasting his record in the process. Here is one salvo that Biden could have delivered crisply and deliberately:
Let’s look at your record, Mr. Trump.
CHILDREN – You blocked extending the child tax credit in January 2022, which was delivering $300 a month to over 60 million children;
WOMEN – You’re opposed to their reproductive rights and want to punish them for their choice, not to mention your long history of abusing women;
WORKERS – You and your Republicans in Congress have long opposed raising the paltry federal minimum wage frozen at $7.25 an hour. As President, you displayed your hatred of Unions and weakened job safety protections;
IMMIGRATION – You single-handedly demanded your Party in Congress abandon a bipartisan immigration reform bill that the Congress was ready to send for my signature earlier this year;
CONSUMERS – You weakened enforcement of life-saving health and safety laws and shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that worked to make Wall Street accountable;
ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH – You think climate disruption is a hoax and tell the main fossil fuel polluters to “Drill, baby, drill” instead of backing planet-saving solar energy and wind power;
PATIENTS – You want to end Obamacare and oppose the expansion of Medicaid in Southern Republican states, taking away healthcare for tens of millions of Americans;
PUBLIC LANDS – Belong to all Americans and their descendants. You want to turn over big chunks of this land to corporations;
TAXPAYERS – In 2017, you gave under-taxed super-profitable corporations and the very rich another giant tax cut which greatly increased the federal deficit; and
Your hatred for the well-being of America shows how phony is your MAGA slogan. That’s just some of what you’ve done to the American people.
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Thursday’s Real Debate Takeaway: Only We the People Can Save US Democracy
The debate happened in a moment when many of our institutions, especially the ones that could be a check on an authoritarian president, are failing—miserably.
Jun 29, 2024
So this is how liberty dies—in the void of an Atlanta TV sound stage plastered with more CNN logos than a NASCAR Camaro, where the relentless march on Washington by an American Mussolini, fueled by lies about everything from national greatness to his sleazy sex life, could not be stopped either by the muzzled moderators or the coughing and occasionally confused 81-year-old who was the last thing standing between the United States and dictatorship.
Everything you need to know about the critical, on-a-ventilator condition of American democracy can be explained by this:
The candidate whose most memorable line was, “I did not have sex with a porn star”—an all-but-certain lie on top of roughly 30 fact-checked falsehoods about important things from NATO to abortion law—and who walked onto the Atlanta stage with 34 felony convictions and civil verdicts of an adjudicated rape and massive financial fraud, and who urged on an attempted coup against the U.S. government, is NOT the guy that pundits are begging to drop out of the 2024 presidential race.
Celebrating four decades of utter fecklessness, consistently choosing candidates not with the goal of winning but with fear-driven hopes of not losing, and consistently siding with rich donors over young people who desperately want a party they can believe in, Democrats are ultimately the ones who threw an 81-year-old deer into the TV headlights of a debate stage.
That guy would be President Joe Biden, who finally beat Medicare—whatever that means—but lost his first debate with Donald Trump, in what may have been his last chance to convince America’s legions of casual, TikTok-besotted, less-tuned-in voters that the oldest president in U.S. history has the strength for another four-plus years in the White House.
It turns out that the president who endured weeks of right-wing conspiracy theories that he was going to be high on Adderall or “jacked up on Mountain Dew” didn’t even bother to take throat lozenges when the moment of truth arrived. Jon Stewart of The Daily Show, who gets paid the big bucks to find the humor in such a dire situation, riffed that both men should have been on performance-enhancing drugs, before gesturing at their pictures and slamming down his papers: “This cannot be real life! It just can’t!... We’re America... God!”
But it was real life.
Thursday night, just like many of you, my phone started pinging around 9:05 pm Eastern with texts from nervous and horrified family members, seriously worried about their future. It was a night that reminded me of three other moments: June 6, 1968, when I was a nine-year-old kid walking to school and heard from a car radio that Robert F. Kennedy Sr. was the latest leader to succumb to assassination; September 11, 2001, when I saw the second tower collapse and wondered how I’d ever explain this to my two grade-school children; and November 8, 2016, when Trump’s first election inspired the same kind of frantic texts I got Thursday night, wondering if America was the nation we thought it was.
But our country used to have the resilience to overcome assassinations, riots, even a large-scale terrorist attack. June 27, 2024 felt different. Thursday’s debate didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened in a moment when many of our institutions, especially the ones that could be a check on an authoritarian president, are failing—miserably.
In the 48 hours before the lights went out in Georgia, a runaway Supreme Court anticipated the next Trump presidency with rulings that all but legalized political bribery, and made it virtually impossible for federal regulators to stop polluters or white-collar criminals. On the cusp of a Christian nationalist America, Oklahoma’s top educator required Bibles in schools, and a Louisiana law mandated the 10 Commandments in classrooms—because they believe that neither our corrupted courts nor a “Red Caesar” president will dare stop them.
Do not obey autocracy in advance. It’s OK and totally normal to feel demoralized today, but then we have 129 days left to prevent the nightmare of Project 2025 from becoming a reality.
And yet perhaps no once-trusted institution is failing America more right now than the news media. CNN’s stellar fact-checker Daniel Dale went before a national audience and in stunning, rapid-fire fashion, exposed nearly 30 lies by Trump, many of them absurd (like grocery prices have quadrupled) or falsely taking credit for things he didn’t do. But this happened at 11:47 pm, more than an hour after the debate and when most folks were asleep.
CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash did no fact-checking in real time, allowing Trump to spin his bizarro-world version of the last eight years uninterrupted. In a typical exchange, the ex-president and convicted felon absurdly lied that “this man [Biden] is a criminal. I did nothing wrong.” Tapper responded simply with, “Thank you, President Trump.” One of the few interruptions came from Bash, who stopped Biden in mid-sentence from setting the record straight on insulin prices.
But the biggest clue that something is terribly wrong in America was, in the spirit of Sherlock Holmes, the dog that did not bark. Nothing in this election is more important than the simple fact that Trump wants to rule as a dictator, who would call up troops to put down protests, launch a dead-of-night mass deportation scheme to send thousands of migrants to desert detention camps, sic the Justice Department on his enemies, and free violent insurrectionists. Don’t listen to me; read the 900-page blueprint for autocracy, the 2025 Project.
And yet in a stunning fail, Project 2025 was never even mentioned during the debate. Not once! Not by CNN, in a shocking example of journalistic malpractice, but also not by Biden. That was one more unforced error by a president who’s actually gotten a lot of stuff done, but just can’t live up to his job as Ronald Reagan reinvented it in the 1980s: performer-in-chief.
Because let’s face it: Another institution that has miserably failed the Americans it purports to represent is the Democratic Party. Celebrating four decades of utter fecklessness, consistently choosing candidates not with the goal of winning but with fear-driven hopes of not losing, and consistently siding with rich donors over young people who desperately want a party they can believe in, Democrats are ultimately the ones who threw an 81-year-old deer into the TV headlights of a debate stage.
And it probably won’t shock you when I say that the American public―not all of it, but a lot of it—is wiser than Friday morning’s shock and gloom from the TV pundits and the political establishment, which has been almost solely focused on Biden’s mumbling performance. But in Thursday night focus groups from coast to coast, many everyday voters who’ve ignored Trump for four years were suddenly reminded why 81 million of us voted against him in 2020. The over-the-top lying. The bullying disrespect of our current president. And the blatant racism, like when Trump accused Biden of being “a bad Palestinian,” which did not suggest fondness for Palestinians, or with his bizarre claim that migrants are taking away “Black jobs,” whatever those are.
In several focus groups Thursday night, voters remained divided, with some more put off by Trump’s lying than by Biden’s shaky performance. “We’re in heat-filled Arizona where we are suffering from climate change,” one swing state voter told an NBC News reporter. “To say that there is no problem with our climate is another lie from Trump.”
In a normal world, Trump’s refusal to even address climate change amid a sweltering summer on the cutting edge of a global climate crisis would be a big story. Instead, New York Times columnists and the talking heads on Morning Joe are discussing nothing else but whether Biden should drop out, which would throw the Democrats into sheer chaos. I’m an agnostic about that. Let’s see some polling data first. But frankly, I’m a lot less worried about Biden than I am about stopping dictatorship.
Do not obey autocracy in advance. It’s OK and totally normal to feel demoralized today, but then we have 129 days left to prevent the nightmare of Project 2025 from becoming a reality. I said it last week and I’ll say it again: If you don’t want a far-right Christian government controlling women’s bodies or putting the 10 Commandments in your kids’ classroom, you should follow the examples of Germany and France and take to the streets and protest. And remember that even a weak Biden, if he’s the candidate, is a bridge to a democratic future, while Trump is a road to nowhere.
Eight years after Trump ran on the false premise of making America great again, it was heartbreaking to watch a 90-minute conversation about the nation’s future that pretended that America still doesn’t have the best universities, the best scientists, the best pop music, and millions of idealistic Gen Z and Millennial folks who want to talk about how to make it even better. Donald Trump will destroy that, and Joe Biden is not going to save us. Neither is Chuck Schumer or Sonia Sotomayor or the next editor of The Washington Post. Thursday’s real debate takeaway is that only we can save ourselves. So let’s get to work.
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Presidential Debate Prediction: Voters and Democracy the Likely Losers
A quality debate requires incisive questions that speak to people’s real needs and concerns as well as real-time factchecking to counter lies and deception. With CNN, we're almost guaranteed to get neither.
Jun 27, 2024
On Thursday, U.S. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will face each other onCNN for the first scheduled debate of the 2024 presidential election. This year, things will be run differently; CNN will be entirely in charge. If history is any guide, things will not go well for democracy.
‘A Fraud on the American Voter’
Once upon a time, presidential debates were hosted by the nonpartisan League of Women Voters, which set the terms and chose the moderators. But the national chairs of the two dominant parties formed the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) and wrested control from the League in 1988. The LWV responded by accusing the parties of
perpetrat[ing] a fraud on the American voter. It has become clear to us that the candidates’ organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity, and answers to tough questions. The league has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.
The result was, as FAIR repeatedly documented (e.g., 10/26/12, 8/26/16, 8/2/19, 2/29/20), largely what the league predicted: few tough questions, most with a right-wing corporate framing, rarely reflecting the issues of most concern to voters. But even the CPD has lost its grip on the debates now, starting in 2022, when the RNC announced its distancing from the organization. Earlier this year, Biden signaled his own interest in working out a debate outside the normal CPD process.
Which brings us to the current situation, featuring two scheduled debates—on June 27 on CNN, and on September 10 on ABC—following rules agreed upon by the host network and the two candidates. CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will moderate the first contest.
As we’ve said before (7/19/23), the public needs to fully understand the stakes of the 2024 election, and that can’t mean a blackout on Trump. But it does require incisive questions that speak to people’s real needs and concerns, and some way of offering real-time factchecking to viewers. CNN viewers are unlikely to get the former, and CNN has already promised not to supply the latter.
Unfit to Host
Of the major nonpartisan news networks (i.e., excluding Fox), CNN is perhaps the least fit to host a presidential debate. In recent elections and primaries, it has repeatedly proved that it’s not an enlightened public the network is after, but ratings (e.g., FAIR.org, 8/2/19, 8/25/22, 7/19/23).
In the most recent example, the network infamously hosted a town hall with Trump during the 2023 Republican primaries. That choice appeared to be entirely self-serving. After working to move the network rightward, then-chair Chris Licht had led CNN to what The Atlantic (6/2/23) described as “its historic nadir,” in terms of ratings as well as newsroom morale. The Trump town hall was the big plan to turn the ship around.
Instead, it quickly proved to be an embarrassment that ultimately cost Licht his job (FAIR.org, 6/8/23). Trump turned the event into what came across as a campaign rally sponsored by CNN, spouting falsehood after falsehood and running roughshod over CNN host Kaitlan Collins in front of cheering fans. (The CNN floor manager instructed the audience that while applause was permitted, booing was not.)
Even in its town halls with Trump’s slightly less truth-challenged primary challengers, the network’s own post-event factchecks showed that CNN hosts—including Tapper and Bash—failed to counter major falsehoods in real time (FAIR.org, 7/19/23).
Reliance on Right-Wing Talking Points
Though Trump (who agreed to the ground rules and choice of host) has been pre-emptively complaining he won’t get a fair shake from such a “biased” outlet—biased to the left, he means—Tapper and Bash hardly have a record of asking left-leaning questions.
CNN didn’t host a presidential debate in 2020, but it did host Democratic primary debates. Beyond its ESPN-like introductions to the candidates and questioning style that seemed designed to foment conflict more than to inform, the network relied heavily on right-wing talking points and assumptions to frame its questions (FAIR.org, 8/2/19).
In just one example, Tapper started off a 2019 Democratic primary debate night by asking Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) whether “tak[ing] private health insurance away from more than 150 million Americans, in exchange for government-sponsored healthcare for everyone,” was “political suicide” (FAIR.org, 8/2/19).
CNN, like its fellow corporate media outlets, is allergic to questions about many issues of critical importance to large numbers of viewers.
In a 2016 Democratic debate, Bash questioned Hillary Clinton on her proposal for paid maternity leave—something every other industrialized nation in the world provides—with a decidedly antagonistic framing (FAIR.org, 7/16/19): “There are so many people who say, ‘Really? Another government program?’ Is that what you’re proposing? And at the expense of taxpayer money?”
After CNN‘s 2023 Trump town hall, Tapper (On With Kara Swisher, 7/10/23) argued that the event was “in the public’s interest.” But there’s no world in which offering a serial liar a town hall stuffed full of people instructed to cheer but not boo serves the public interest. Tapper’s take on the “public interest” doesn’t bode well for his performance this week.
On the central foreign policy issue of the year—Israel’s months-long assault on Gaza—Tapper and Bash both have exhibited a strong pro-Israel bias (FAIR.org, 5/3/24). It’s not a promising setup for a debate between a strongly pro-Israel candidate occasionally critical of the country’s right-wing government (Biden) and a strongly pro-Israel candidate aligned with that right wing (Trump).
And CNN, like its fellow corporate media outlets, is allergic to questions about many issues of critical importance to large numbers of viewers. In its first 2019 Democratic primary debate (FAIR.org, 8/2/19), CNN asked more non-policy questions—primarily about whether some candidates were “moving too far to the left to win the White House”—than questions about the climate crisis. Across two nights of debates, the network’s 31 non-policy questions overwhelmed those on key issues like gun control (11) and women’s rights (7).
Factcheck Abdication
The debate and its terms have been agreed to by both Biden and Trump. There will be no audience on Thursday. The candidates’ microphones will be muted when it’s not their turn to speak. In a first for a presidential debate, there will be two commercial breaks during the debate. (It remains to be seen which giant corporations will be sponsoring this supposed exercise in democracy.)
What will this format offer viewers—and, more broadly, democracy? The microphone rule should help avoid the 2020 debate debacle, in which Trump’s incessant interruptions rendered the event virtually unwatchable (FAIR.org, 10/2/20). But Trump doesn’t just interrupt incessantly; he lies incessantly as well. Will Tapper and Bash factcheck every lie, even if it means doing so more often to Trump than to Biden?
It’s hard to imagine how the public will be served by a “debate” featuring a notorious fabulist in which the moderators don’t even try to point out blatant lies.
Shockingly, CNN isn’t even going to pretend to try. Political director David Chalian (New York Times, 6/24/24) said that a live debate “is not the ideal arena for live factchecking,” so instead the moderators would be “facilitating the debate between these candidates, not being a participant in that debate.” Factchecking will be reserved for post-show analysis. Meanwhile, moderators “will use all tools at their disposal to enforce timing and ensure a civilized discussion” (CNN, 6/15/24).
On the one hand, Trump has made real-time factchecking essentially impossible, because the rate at which he puts forth falsehoods would require constant interruption. Of the 74 Trump debate claims checked by Politifact (2/2/24), only two were judged “true,” and seven “mostly true.” Across time and setting, 58% of Biden’s claims were judged at least “half true,” compared to 24% for Trump.
On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine how the public will be served by a “debate” featuring a notorious fabulist in which the moderators don’t even try to point out blatant lies. Saving factchecking for after the debate won’t help the millions who tune out when the debate ends. And you can hardly expect an opponent to be responsible for countering every lie Trump tells.
CNN has never been particularly good at factchecking (e.g., FAIR.org, 10/4/11, 10/5/12). Now with a candidate and party that aggressively disdain facts and honesty, the network is virtually guaranteed to fail the public even more miserably—and with potentially graver consequences.
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