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Victor Davis Hanson: The real story was how debate moderators ‘ruined’ their reputations, ABC’s brand

September 11, 2024 | | Print Article

Conservative political commentator Victor Davis Hanson concluded that ABC’s moderators for the presidential debate thrashed their reputations and the network’s brand due to their blatant bias.

In the end, their brazen devotion to Vice President Kamala Harris could backfire and help Trump win the election. That was not their intention last night as they fact-checked Trump into oblivion and coddled Harris while gaslighting American voters.

“The Candy Crowley Debate. What do we remember, if anything now, about the second presidential debate of 2012? Not whether Obama or Romney won. But only how CNN’s Candy Crowley blew up her career and embarrassed CNN—by outrageously hijacking the debate, and as a partisan, fact-checking (and erroneously so) Romney in efforts to help Obama,” VDH wrote on X.

“So, too, we won’t remember much of these debate details, given the shameful role of the two ABC moderators,” he correctly assessed.

Hanson saw right through the lies and flip-flopping of Harris. He had no tolerance for her spewed propaganda either.

“Harris came out calm, exceeded low expectations, repeated well her memorized talking points, avoided until the last 20 minutes her trademark word-salads, and repeatedly baited and incited an increasingly angrier Trump,” he wrote.

“Harris called for unity, while smearing him as a racist and repeating the old lies about Charlottesville, ‘bloodbath,’ the 2025 project, and Trump’s supposed support for a federal ban on abortion,” VDH noted.

It was the vice president’s brazen dishonesty concerning her policies that seemed to gall Hanson the most.

“Trump might seem to have matched or beaten Harris if one only reads a transcript of the entire debate—given she never honestly would or could reconcile her past and antithetical present positions. Nor could Harris explain why she simply did not implement her visions either the last three years or would do so in the next five months,” the respected historian continued. “An irritated Trump started well and ended well; she in-between calmly and successfully at times baited and got Trump’s goat.”

“But all that will neither matter nor be recalled. The debate will instead be remembered as a three-on-one pile-on, given the unprofessional and biased team of ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis. Rather than refuting pre-debate fears that their past anti-Trump biases would warp the debate, they only confirmed them,” he stated echoing the sentiments of conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly.

The network has been in the tank 100% for Harris since she was crowned as the anointed one following the soft coup that took out President Biden as a candidate. The moderators emphasized that fact by allowing Harris to regurgitate one lie after another.

“Both disrupted the tempo to fact check (sometimes in error), and to editorialize Trump’s statements, while letting Harris’s Charlottesville, IVF, national abortion ban, ‘bloodbath’ or 2025 lies go unchecked,” Hanson recounted.

“Often their disruptive fact checks of Trump were simply wrong, such as their preposterous claim that no states allow partial birth or late abortions where the viable baby is terminated—when at least six states put no limitations on any abortions,” he factually asserted.

The provocation of Trump was by design and the scripted handling of Harris would make any banana republic proud.

“The questions addressed to Trump on January 6 were designed to provoke. They had no counterpart addressed to Harris—as for example, would she distance herself from Biden, or how she came to win the nomination without winning any elected delegates, or her last person in the room on Afghanistan boast, or if she wished to retract any of her inflammatory past statements, such as bragging that the deadly 2020 demonstrations would not and should not stop, or her tweets to help bail out violent 2020 rioters, or her lie that the border patrol whipped immigrants in the manner reminiscent of slavery and the Klan, or her boast that she was a radical and woke,” Hanson pointed out.

“Instead, Muir and Davis only asked Trump about supposedly controversial past statements. Harris was never reprimanded for trying to speak over Trump. Trump was reminded to address the question asked; not so Harris who rarely did,” he added.

Hanson contended that the overreaching bias of the moderators could help Trump more than hurt him. Hanson strongly believes the shameless bias of the moderators hammered ABC’s reputation into the dirt permanently.

“Watching the entire debate may have aided Harris, given her low expectations. Yet the better sound bites in the next week may help Trump. But the moderators’ shameless bias may swing empathy toward Trump. So, the real story was how ABC’s moderators ruined the debate, their own reputations, and their network’s brand,” he concluded.

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