After the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, the predominant US media response to the debate was, like the global public response, one of horror: “An epic moment of national shame” (Politico, 9/30/20); “The Worst Presidential Debate Ever” (Poynter, 9/30/20); “A shitshow” (CNN, 9/29/20).
But while many were willing to pin the blame where it belonged—on Trump, who interrupted, name-called, lied, and refused to follow any rules of debate or decorum—some of the nation’s most prominent outlets clung desperately to the same absurd even-handedness that has gotten us into this shitshow in the first place.
“Trump, Biden Clash in Contentious First Debate: The two candidates constantly spoke over each other in exchanges more notable for rancor than policy nuance,” ran the September 30 Wall Street Journal headline (or, in their print edition: “Trump, Biden Trade Insults in Debate Full of Crosstalk”).
Which candidate was responsible for more than three quarters of the interruptions? Don’t look to the Wall Street Journal for answers.
Or take the New York Times‘ front page analysis (9/30/20):
The first presidential debate between President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. unraveled into an ugly melee Tuesday, as Mr. Trump hectored and interrupted Mr. Biden nearly every time he spoke and the former vice president denounced the president as a “clown” and told him to “shut up.”
In a chaotic, 90-minute back-and-forth, the two major party nominees expressed a level of acrid contempt for each other unheard-of in modern American politics.
“Trump, Biden, Hurl Insults That Obscure Substance in Testy First Debate,” announced the Dallas Morning News (9/30/20). “Donald Trump and Joe Biden spent the night throwing haymakers at each other during the most caustic, and at times, disgraceful debate in modern history,” the article began. “Did it change any minds? That’s hard to say with all the noise. Trump said that Biden wasn’t a smart person, while Biden called the president a liar. It went that way most of the night.”
Moderator (if we can call him that) Chris Wallace of Fox News surprised everyone by including unannounced questions about climate change after activist demands (e.g., FAIR.org, 9/22/20)—the first time the topic has been broached in the last three presidential election cycles. But overall, when he was able to get a word in edgewise, Wallace largely stuck to the familiar debate script (FAIR.org, 8/2/19, 2/29/20), framing many questions in such a way as to reinforce right-wing assumptions.
For instance, on the question of protests over systemic racism and police violence, Wallace demanded of Biden: “Have you ever called the Democratic Mayor of Portland or the Democratic Governor of Oregon and said, “Hey, you got to stop this, bring in the National Guard, do whatever it takes, but you’d stop the days and months of violence in Portland.”
On the economy, Wallace managed to frame a question with about as rosy an image of the economy possible given the current circumstances: “The economy is, I think it’s fair to say, recovering faster than expected from the shutdown. The unemployment rate fell to 8.4% last month. The Federal Reserve says the hit to growth, which is going to be there, is not going to be nearly as big as they had expected. President Trump, you say we are in a V-shaped recovery. Vice President Biden, you say it’s more of a K-shape. What difference does that mean to the American people in terms of the economy?”
Economic experts nearly unanimously say a V-shaped recovery—a sharp rise back from a steep decline—is impossible (Newsweek, 9/30/20), and the country is in fact experiencing a K-shaped one in which only the wealthy recover (Salon, 9/9/20); by framing it as a matter of opinion, then, Wallace handed Trump a gift that he scarcely deserved.
Before the debate, Wallace claimed his goal was to be “invisible”—a misguided goal if there ever was one, when confronting a candidate like Trump who offers far more lies than facts. Afterwards, he told a Times reporter (9/30/20): “I guess I didn’t realize — and there was no way you could, hindsight being 20/20 — that this was going to be the president’s strategy, not just for the beginning of the debate but the entire debate.”
Moderator Chris Wallace told the Times, “I guess I didn’t realize — and there was no way you could, hindsight being 20/20 — that this was going to be the president’s strategy.” Reality TV experts beg to differ.
It’s true, it’s easy to criticize after the fact—and it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for anyone tasked with corralling Trump, particularly with few real tools to do so—but Trump’s strategy was not, in fact, impossible to predict. As reality show producer Mark Cronin wrote in Columbia Journalism Review the day before the debate (9/28/20), “the past four years have been a constant reinforcement of the idea that no matter what outrageous thing he says about or directly to someone, Trump will pay a small price compared with those he has disparaged.” (Note the passive construction whereby no blame is directly laid; but of course, journalists who fail to speak truth to power have failed us miserably these last four years.)
Cronin correctly predicted that Trump would use tried-and-true reality show conflict techniques in the debate—from “deny everything, admit nothing, and make counteraccusations” to “extreme personal attacks,” and culminating with “breaking all the agreed-upon debate rules.”
To Cronin, “the televised debates are reality television, whether we want to admit it or not. And to pretend otherwise is to allow Trump to carry the day virtually unopposed.” The only solution he offered was to encourage Biden to challenge Trump right back, making personal attacks that get under his skin and make him look bad. Which, coming from a reality TV producer, is probably to be expected.
Many pundits have suggested that the Commission on Presidential Debates allow moderators to cut the candidates’ microphones, and the CPD has already announced they’ll be making changes to the format to address the situation (CBS, 10/1/20). But mic-cutting is no solution given a media obsessed with the appearance of even-handedness. By two different counts, Trump was responsible for more than three-quarters of the interruptions (Washington Post, 9/30/20; Slate, 9/30/20). A committed corporate journalist would cringe at the idea of cutting off one candidate three times as much as the other, no matter the facts of the case, but cutting them off equally would clearly be absurd.
The problem is not one that can be solved by new rules, because debates—from high school debate club to presidential debates—are predicated on certain assumptions: that each person has a right to be heard, that competing positions are put forth, that claims must be supported by logic and facts, and that debaters are not entitled to their own facts. When one candidate refuses to acknowledge or play by these rules, no amount of tweaking by the CPD will change the outcome.
And when you have a candidate—who also happens to be the sitting president—who will not respect the rules of debate, who deliberately casts doubt on the legitimacy of the election, and who issues directives to white supremacist groups from a national stage, the only reasonable thing for journalists to do is to not just call for an end to the debates, but to call for an end to the Trump presidency.
As media critic Eric Boehlert has pointed out repeatedly (e.g., Press Run, 5/15/20), editorial boards across the country—including USA Today and the Philadelphia Inquirer—eagerly called for Bill Clinton’s resignation in the late ’90s over his extramarital affair. Today, as Trump openly threatens our very democracy, where is the equivalent outrage?
The Washington Post took a strong stand…for letting the moderator cut off the microphones (9/30/20). To the New York Times editorial board (10/1/20), we simply must plod along, and we certainly mustn’t cancel the debates: Biden—and Americans—should “show up” for all of the remaining debates, the paper says, because “Donald Trump is their president. They need to face him, and the reckoning that he has brought on the Republic.” One might ask what the Times imagines we’ve been doing all this time if not “facing” the president and what’s he brought on the republic—or if they imagine telling us to sit down and watch the nightmare unfold as our democratic duty represents the exhaustion of their own.
FAIR is supposed to be unbiased. Yet you thoughtlessly write “… many were willing to pin the blame where it belonged—ON TRUMP, who interrupted, name-called, lied, and refused to follow any rules of debate or decorum”. Did you actually watch the debate, or did you only read what MSM said?
Did you see that it was Biden that made the first interruptions?
Please leave your personal bias out of it, or you do your organisation a disservice.
Chris
Cite the time stamp for the “first interruptions” and then please read the rest of the article and respond to the actual criticisms of the media and their treatment of Trump, which is exactly in line with FAIR’s mission to call out lack of fairness and accuracy in media. Did you get to the part about how differently the media treats Trump than they treated Clinton? Some of you Trump fans are suffering from a persecution complex.
-Chris #2
Don’t be silly Chris. To suggest that “pinning the blame where it belongs” is being biased is nonsense. We live in a world where there ARE some baseline REALITIES. To even suggest that Trump’s tantrum performance was ANYTHING but a non stop monologue of vitriolic belligerent juvenile inaccuracies peppered with personal insults and a blatant disregard for the agreed upon debate format, as well as a lack of common decency & respect….. begs the question of “Did you even watch the event?”
By peevishly and sophomorically reacting as he did, Joe Dough enabled The Killer Clown’s bully shitting. Had he simply refused to participate until Wallace enforced decorum, there’d be no doubt as to where responsibility for this debacle lay, and denied the corpress its “both sides” narrative.
But he didn’t, because his own machismo prevailed, and because he frankly doesn’t possess the ability to think on his feet. While I dearly despise Dear Misleader (the sainted O-bomb-a), I have to believe he’d have had the presence of mind to avoid that toxic trap.
I can’t stomach even the NORMAL debates – they’re typically nothing more than than monologues of sound-bites virtually written by campaign advisers, with fantasy promises and ‘what-if’ scenarios, hosted by right-leaning ‘moderators’ who themselves are looking for media exposure. Debates may have had a place in politics before the advent of modern media (ie; the Lincoln/Douglas debates), but now they’re an anachronism, since there are numerous reliable online sources where voters can find out a candidate’s voting record and political history, the most reliable predictors of how that candidate would function in-office. One of the least reliable predictors is campaign rhetoric…
Debates should go the way of the horse-drawn carriage. Not that technology has overtaken them, but we, the press, the parties, and the electorate no longer has the moral courage or ethics to demand better. By that, I mean, they will not say that Trump is a profligate, lying, bullying psychopath who should be in daily treatment, not daily twittering. He doesn’t belong anywhere near even the lowliest public office. His mental illness is not manageable by the press, the party he leads, the opposition, no one.
Our president suffers from evident psychopathology, and that needs reporting again and again. Talk to Dr. Bandy X. Lee. We have to listen to the experts on this man’s psychosis. He isn’t only a menace to us, but to the world, too.
You would have to be living under a rock to not notice how much the press hates Trump and would do anything to elect Biden. Calling them out for ‘both sides’-ing something that objectively both sides did do because it didn’t accurately reflect how Trump was the worse offender seams…… extremely petty and short sided. The last thing the press needs to do is further alienate any potential Trump supporters by concentrating on minutia.
All the chatter of of not following the rules of debate, ‘decorum’ and so forth, papers over both the woefully poor quality of the human material on display and the complete lack of any program to address the dire crisis of American capitalism in its terminal decline. As in all decaying and imploding empires, the kakistocracy atop the the US fiddles while it burns. This degenerate ruling class has no ‘answers’ it can sell to the electorate, and the personal qualities of our two Neros capture the essence of the US empire: aggressively delusional (Trump), and stumbling in a comatose ‘walking death rattle’ (Biden) toward the abyss. Regardless of who wins this election (it may not be either Nero), the outcome still will be extremely dangerous for the rest of the world and our species.
I watched the entire fiasco. It is astounding that ANY media outlet, left center or right, would make any attempt to convince anyone that we did not see the president of the United States having a TANTRUM that was a non stop monologue of vitriolic belligerent juvenile inaccuracies peppered with rude personal insults and a blatant disregard for the agreed upon debate format, as well as a lack of common decency & respect for his opponent, the moderator AND THE VIEWERS! Come on, the Orange Emperor has NO CLOTHES!
I watched the entire fiasco. It is astounding that ANY media outlet, left center or right, would make any attempt to convince anyone that we did not see the president of the United States having a vitriolic belligerent juvenile and inaccurate TANTRUM that was peppered with rude personal insults and a blatant disregard for the agreed upon debate format. In addition he exhibited a lack of basic civility & respect for his opponent, the moderator AND THE VIEWERS! Come on, the Orange Emperor has NO CLOTHES!
You cut off a micswhenever the person behind it isn’r supposed to be speaking. If they must interrupt, m them raise their hands like schoolkids.
Exactly. Simple. Fair. Unbiased. The clock dictates.
Trump had the opportunity to expose Biden’s racist, warmongering prostitution to the oligarchy. Instead, he merely demonstrated his own asininity. Too bad the plutocracy excluded from the debate the only candidates anyone with a brain and a conscience could vote for.
Trump had the opportunity to reveal Biden’s record as a racist, warmongering prostitute for the plutocracy. Instead, he revealed only his own asininity. Too bad the oligarchy excluded from the debate the only candidates anyone with a brain and a conscience could vote for.
Show a split screen all the time and as soon as it’s one cadidate’s turn speak show an icon of the other’s mic being muted and staying so till its again their turn. No descretion on the moderator’s part. Make it plain as can be ,dems (no pun intended) the rules and they get enforced automaticaly and consistently. No candidate ever gets the chance to interupy cuase if it is not there turn their mic is off. Do the same thing when a candidate is asked a question ,given an allowcated amount of time to respond but instead of respecting their limit they go on after their time is up . Let them finish and the sentence they are in the midde of and flash them and us halfway and a 30seconds remaining lights.
Almost everyone Loves a Circus, and this is what we have in place of a Government, a Three Ring Circus, or known also as cheap entertainment for the ignorant masses. This is a sad reflection on the educational (Brainwashing) systems for the past 100 years. “When I think back on all the crap I learned in High School, it’s a wonder I can think at all.” Song….I, myself, dropped out in my 1st semester of the second year of high school, and guess what? I can still think for myself, objectively……
The hole debate seems fake to me. To me there is no difference between the democratic camp and the trumpies. They both want to continue to wage wars and cater the same interest groups. Just the hilaristas are slightly more deep state. Poor USA, the world goes to hell and people engage in futile discussions. No matter who wins, the military industrial complex did already.
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