NEW YORK– Hours after ABC News announced the rules for next Tuesday’s presidential debate, resolving a final dispute in Donald Trump’s favor, the former president went on the attack — against ABC News.
“I think a lot of people are going to watch to see how mean they are, how dishonest they are,” he said at a Fox News town hall on Wednesday.
It was an unsubtle reminder that Trump and Kamala Harris aren’t the only ones with a lot at stake next week. The same goes for ABC News and moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis, in what is the only scheduled debate between the presidential candidates this fall.
Multiple outlets will broadcast and stream it. But unlike in years past, when presidential debates were organized by a bipartisan committee, this is solely an ABC News production. There will be no live audience.
“This is a tremendous opportunity for ABC News,” said Ben Sherwood, former president of ABC News and now publisher & CEO of the Daily Beast. “It’s like hosting, moderating and producing the Super Bowl of politics. It adds shine to the network at a time when television broadcasting is in decline.”
That is of course true when things go well.
The ABC debate took place last spring, when President Joe Biden was the likely Democratic nominee. When he dropped out, it was unclear whether the debate would continue. Harris and Trump ultimately gave the go-ahead, although the Republican’s repeated criticism of ABC last month again raised questions about this.
It all had little effect on ABC’s schedule, said Rick Klein, chief of the network’s Washington bureau. “It really wasn’t a lot of turmoil on our side of things,” he said.
Biden and Trump debated on June 27 – which seems like a lifetime ago. That event was hosted by CNN, though it is remembered more for Biden’s shaky performance that ultimately led to him ending his campaign than for anything done by the network or its moderators, Dana Bash and Jake Tapper.
“Ultimately, this is about helping create a forum for the candidates to interact with the public,” Klein said. “It’s a huge responsibility. It is a humbling responsibility.”
An estimated 51.3 million people watched Biden and Trump in June. But that was before many people were really tuned in to the election, and the potential rematch of the 2020 campaign drew little enthusiasm. Tuesday’s debate will almost certainly reach more people, regardless of whether it comes close to the record debate audience of 84 million people for the first showdown between Hillary Clinton and Trump in 2016.
Muir’s “World News Tonight” has topped the evening news ratings for eight years, effectively making him America’s most popular news anchor. On many nights, “World News Tonight” has a bigger audience than anything on prime-time television.
A secret to his success has been ABC’s attempts to build an apolitical image for him. Tuesday’s crowd will be his largest ever — including people who largely don’t know Muir because they look elsewhere for news — and it’s for a political event in polarized times.
Davis keeps a lower profile, though she hosts ABC’s nightly streaming newscast, fills in for Muir and has moderated presidential nomination debates in the past. Many will see her in action for the first time on Tuesday.
Although more complicated in the Trump years, the role of debate moderator often resembles that of baseball umpires: It signals they’ve done a good job when you don’t really notice them. If Muir or Davis figure prominently in Wednesday morning’s stories, that’s probably not a good sign.
“It’s definitely a minefield,” said Tom Bettag, former ABC News “Nightline” producer. “Just ask Chris Wallace.”
Wallace was highly respected, considered an equal and worked at Fox News in 2020, when he moderated the first Biden-Trump debate, “so the Trump people couldn’t accuse him of being a liberal hack,” Bettag said. it still blew up pretty bad.” Trump’s frequent interruptions irritated Biden and led to criticism that Wallace was losing control of the evening.
That’s less likely to happen this year because debate rules require a candidate’s microphone to be muted when his opponent speaks, something Trump’s campaign sought because interruptions turn off many voters.
An open mic led to one of Harris’ most remembered conversations during her 2020 debate with Vice President Mike Pence. “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking,” she said when Pence interrupted one of her answers, a moment many women could relate to in business situations with men.
Although Bash and Tapper occasionally tried to steer Trump or Biden back to the questions when the politicians dodged in the CNN debate in June, they did not correct any lies or inaccuracies, many of which were noted in the post-debate analysis. While Klein would not commit to the same policy, he did say that “it is a debate between them and we are there to facilitate the conversation.”
Even before his appearance on Fox News this week, Trump had repeatedly criticized ABC News, even as he twice agreed to participate in a debate on the network.
He has specifically targeted the network’s political journalists, George Stephanopoulos and Jonathan Karl. The former president filed a defamation lawsuit against Stephanopoulos last spring over comments the journalist made about Trump’s liability for sexual abuse of advice columnist E. Jean Carroll. ABC has said Stephanopoulos was not involved in the preparation of the debate.
Trump has also discussed the friendship between Harris and Dana Walden, a top executive at Walt Disney Co., ABC’s parent company, whose oversight recently expanded to include ABC News. ABC has said Walden is not involved in news coverage decisions.
To some extent, Trump’s comments can be seen as “guiding the referees” or appealing to supporters who don’t like the press. A nightmare scenario for ABC is that Trump lashes out on Tuesday when he thinks things are not going well for him.
“From our perspective, we just have to do our job and do it the best we can,” Klein said.
He would not provide details about how ABC’s preparations are going, such as which figures have been assigned to portray Harris or Trump in mock debates.
Bettag, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland who is teaching a course on the presidential campaign this fall, has been involved in these preparations before. He advises Muir and Davis to take a deep breath.
“The most important thing is to stay calm, which is difficult because they’re probably going to get yelled at,” he said. “It’s very important to try to keep their voice down and stay steady.”
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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him up http://x.com/dbauder
