Months after the controversial ABC News presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, moderator David Muir is continuing to face backlash for his apparent bias in incessant fact-checking of Trump’s statements. Many have viewed the event as rigged against Trump, which has further fueled rampant distrust of the mainstream media.
In the wake of the September presidential debate, Muir faced an onslaught of criticism from former President Trump and his supporters alike. The Republican presidential candidate has continually referred to Muir as a “lightweight” who orchestrated a three-versus-one attack against him to prop up Vice President Kamala Harris.
Author and commentator Edward Ring voiced a widespread opinion that Muir is “partisan” representing a sentiment that the mainstream media is a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, sowing distrust among the general public. “David Muir is a partisan hack masquerading as the ABC “news” anchorman. He elicits nothing but contempt and mistrust from anyone paying attention. ABC “news” brainwashes over 7 people per night,” Ring wrote.
Trump has made similar statements about Muir’s moderation, suggesting that he has “lost all credibility” after the debate. “A lot of people standing right over there will tell you exactly what it was. We’ll show you what it was. David Muir has lost all credibility. The other person, I never heard of her. I never want to hear of her. She was terrible. I don’t know how she ever got her job in the first place, but we have a country to save, and we can’t have fake news like that. And his ratings deserve to go down,” Trump during a previous press conference.
Giving credence to these claims, The American Tribune reported on the opinion of the co-founder and co-chair of Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., the co-founder and co-chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates, who stated the ABC News debate was the “worst performance” he had ever seen from debate moderators in the decades of debates he had observed.
“What really shocked me last night was the way the moderators handled it. You know, we always explain to our moderators — and we’ve done 33 of these debates, starting back in 1988 — that their job is to be facilitators. They’re not supposed to get involved themselves,” he said. “It’s different than if you had someone on your show and you asked them a question, and they answered in a different way than they said a month before. You would correct them. But moderators are not supposed to do that,” he added.
“A debate is between the candidates, not a debate between the candidate and the moderators. And these moderators, as far as I was concerned, it was the worst performance that I’ve seen,” the presidential debate expert continued. “I don’t know what their thoughts were, but they clearly were oversized, I think, on the way they treated the former president and the way they treated the present vice president. I think they bent backwards to help her,” he stated.
Watch Trump sound off on Muir below:
Featured image credit: By The White House from Washington, DC – President Trump Visits Honeywell International Inc., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=89932888
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