Sept. 20, Ben Voth, a professor of rhetoric and director of debate at SMU Dallas, for a piece critical of the way some media outlets have been conducting presidential debates in recent years. Published in The Hill under the heading A lesson for CBS: Live fact-checking is incompatible with good debate moderation: https://tinyurl.com/mrxvrccw
Lindsey Davis and David Muir of ABC News moderated ABC’s Sept. 10 presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. The debate, the second of the year, demonstrates the collapse of the traditional Commission on Presidential Debate forums that came into being in 1987. The commission originally planned to host a series of debates this fall that neither of the political parties would agree to for their campaigns.
The collapse of that process led to the current regimen of media network debate events now hosted by CNN and ABC. Most analysts recognize that Muir and Davis engaged in arguably partisan fact checking against the Trump campaign, raising inherent questions about how the next debate among vice presidential candidates Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) might be moderated by CBS News journalists Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan.
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