In their first and potentially only debate on September 10, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump engaged in a high-profile primetime clash that attracted substantial viewership. However, in the aftermath, ABC’s “World News Tonight” with David Muir, one of the debate moderators who frequently attempted to ‘fact-check’ Trump but never Harris, has seen a significant decline in his show’s ratings.
The nightly news program averaged 6.7 million viewers for episodes aired on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday following the debate, a drop from its 2024 average of 7.6 million viewers. This 12% decrease in viewership was notably sharper compared to the minor declines experienced by “CBS Evening News” and “NBC Nightly News” during the same period. Despite the drop, Muir’s newscast remains the leading evening news program.
Since then, Trump has referred to the ABC-hosted debate as a “rigged deal” and claimed he did “great” despite the odds being “3-to-1.” Last Thursday, Trump announced that there would be no more debates. On his Truth Social platform, Trump declared victory in the debate and addressed future plans. He wrote, “When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘I WANT A REMATCH.’ Polls clearly show that I won the Debate against Comrade Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ Radical Left Candidate.”
former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly criticized ABC News for its handling of the first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. What started as a contentious debate on foreign policy in Philadelphia, Kelly claimed, soon became a “rigged” event orchestrated by ABC News to favor Harris, she charged.
Kelly specifically targeted the network’s moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, accusing them of extreme bias towards Harris. The most significant revelation, according to Kelly, was the alleged involvement of Disney executive Dana Walden, who oversees ABC News. Kelly suggested that Walden, a close personal friend of Harris who played a key role in introducing the vice president to her husband, Doug Emhoff, was behind the scenes influencing the debate.
“I’m disgusted. I’m ashamed of those moderators at ABC News. They did exactly what their bosses wanted them to do. The person who runs ABC News is a close personal friend of Kamala Harris and is responsible for Kamala Harris and her husband meeting. They did Dana Walden’s bidding tonight. It was three against one on that debate stage this evening,” she began in a short video posted immediately after the debate.
Also, following the debate, tensions have escalated over the conduct of ABC News moderators Muir and Linsey Davis. While many media outlets declared Harris the winner, accusations of moderator bias have stirred controversy, including from a prominent figure within the Commission on Presidential Debates.
Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., co-founder and co-chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates, publicly criticized the ABC moderators for what he viewed as a breach of protocol. His concerns focused on the moderators’ role in the debate, highlighting what he perceived as favoritism toward Harris during the event.
“I thought one of the things that really shocked me last night was the way the moderators handled it. We always explain to our moderators, and we’ve done 33 of those, Greta, starting back in 1988, that their job is to be facilitators,” he told host Greta Van Susteren. “They’re not to get involved themselves. It’s different than if you had someone on your show and you asked them a question and they answered it in a different way than they said a month before, you would correct them. But moderators are not supposed to do that. A debate is between the candidates, not a debate between the candidate and the moderators.”
Continuing, he said: “And these moderators, so far as I was concerned, it was the worst performance that I’ve seen. And I’ve — as I said, I’ve done 33 of these things over the years. 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.”
Disclaimer: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.