New York Times media reporter Michael Grynbaum made Wednesday’s paper with the smugly confident post-presidential debate “Media Memo,” “ABC’s Matter-of-Fact Moderators Built Factual Guardrails Around Trump.”
Fifteen minutes into Tuesday’s debate, former President Donald J. Trump was delivering a circuitous answer about his stance on abortion rights when he made a statement with no basis in reality: that a governor had condoned executing babies after birth.
Linsey Davis, one of the evening’s moderators from ABC News, did not let that one slide. “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born,” Ms. Davis said, matter-of-factly.
That’s not what Trump was arguing, but neither ABC nor NYT wanted to know.
Trump was clearly referring to a 2019 interview by then-Democratic governor Ralph Northam in which the host asked him to explain a local politician comments when she said her bill would permit an abortion even if a woman was ready to give birth. Northam responded with a ramble that suggested he was indeed comfortable with an infant being born and then murdered, or “executed,” as Trump put it.
Northam: The infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.
Grynbaum continued to fluff for ABC News.
In the context of 105 minutes of fierce debate in Philadelphia, these exchanges were fleeting. But they signaled a shift -- for an evening, at least -- in the balance of power between Mr. Trump and the many journalists who have struggled, or stopped trying, to construct factual guardrails around the bombardment of baseless claims that he regularly unleashes on live TV.
Using calm and authoritative tones, Mr. Muir and Ms. Davis offered a model for real-time fact-checking that has been absent from many recent presidential debates. Mr. Trump’s apocalyptic portrait of an America besieged by migrant crime was met by Mr. Muir’s polite reply: “As you know, the F.B.I. says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”
“They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime! It was a fraud!” Mr. Trump retorted.
“President Trump, thank you,” said Mr. Muir, before moving on.
Trump was noting that some major cities are not reporting crime data to the FBI, which was true.
Grybaum indirectly noted the moderators’ pro-Harris slant, without raising the issue of bias.
There were almost no moments of tension between the moderators and the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, and the ABC anchors skipped several opportunities to follow up with her on tough topics like the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and Ms. Harris’s shifting positions on fracking and the southern border.
But Mr. Trump delivered, by one count, more than two dozen falsehoods over the course of the evening, while Ms. Harris’s factually questionable remarks were more misleading than flagrantly untrue.
That discrepancy did not stop Mr. Trump’s allies -- even before the debate was finished -- from accusing ABC of bias.
Grynbaum squeezed on more soft soap:
[Muir] and Ms. Davis, who hosts the Sunday edition of “World News Tonight,” have taken pains to present themselves as nonpartisan figures. Mr. Trump even chose Mr. Muir to conduct his first major TV interview after taking office in 2017.
