ABC News Fact Checks Changed Rules for Presidential Debates

It’s official: TV-news anchors can fact-check presidential candidates during a national debate.

In an era when news outlets have been loath to make themselves the target of invective from partisans, ABC News on Tuesday night opted to allow moderators in a broadcast of a presidential debate to correct the participating candidates — mostly former President Donald Trump — in real time, an element often missing from such events. ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis often gave in to Trump’s demand for more time to respond to Vice President Kamala Harris’ comments, but they also stopped him short by telling him in no uncertain terms that some of the stuff he was peddling — rants about babies being killed after delivery and immigrants in Ohio eating animals — were pure hogwash.

“There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born,” Davis said, after Trump spun a tale about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz — Harris’ running mate — allowing the execution of babies brought to term. When Trump made a dubious claim about immigrants in Ohio dining on cats and dogs, Muir told him that ABC News had called the city manager of Springfield — the town Trump to which Trump had referred — and discovered officials had found no credible evidence of such behavior.

“The people on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food,’” Trump said. “I’m not taking this from television,” Muir answered. “I’m taking it from the city manager.”

Spokespersons for ABC News could not be reached for immediate comment.

Real-time fact-checking on this order hasn’t been a regular element of TV-news interviews, and usually not of debates. CNN made a decision to stay away from such stuff during its June telecast of a debate between Trump and President Joe Biden that was moderated by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. The general feeling is that such forums are meant to give newsmakers and people of interest time to answer questions in depth, and that the exchanges will allow viewers to make decisions about what they hear. Besides, any number of TV anchors will tell you that they worry about getting mired in an “I’m-right-you’re-wrong” discussion on TV — something they feel tests the loyalties of the audience, who might just decide to watch something else.

“One of the things I’ve picked up over the years, whether it’s Secretary Clinton or Donald Trump or whomever, the tougher the question, the more low-key the delivery. It’s more effective. Because then it’s not about, ‘Oh Candidate X and Reporter Y are having this exchange,’ or ‘Look at the ego on Reporter Y.’ It’s not about that. It’s just about the question and the answer,” Tapper told Variety in 2016, after he had captured some spotlight for questioning then-candidate Trump relentlessly on screen about a racist remark he made about a judge. “It’s not that easy.”

ABC News executives clearly had that in mind. Davis and Muir never raised their voices and never sought to turn their exchanges with Trump into verbal sparring. They simply pointed out that what he had said was wrong — and showed they had evidence to prove it.

Others have been testing these waters. On CNN, 10 p.m. anchor Abby Phillip tries to hold a raucous table to account each evening on “NewsNight,” in which a panel of guests from different background try to hash out the issues of the day. Phillip will occasionally correct someone who puts out misleading information, quietly telling them what CNN’s reporting has determined. But she doesn’t raise the volume in order to do so.

The presidential debates have in the past been hidebound affairs – and with good reason. Between 1988 and 2020, the non-partisan Commission on Presidential Debates organized the process, lining up moderators on its own. Modern politics, however, seem to have overspilled the traditional container. The candidates and their campaigns would rather play to their constituencies and avoid some of the architecture of traditional debate logistics, which seek to limit some of the outbursts that have become inevitable in a social-media age (and often prove ineffective in doing so).

Republicans and Democrats have been eager to circumvent the organization their own parties set in motion in 1987, after several elections in which the debates were put together by the League of Women Voters. In 2020, Trump and Biden abandoned their final CPD debate in favor of dueling town halls. Biden took to ABC News, while NBC News counter-programmed by dispatching a canny Savannah Guthrie to moderate Trump.

Now, everything about these debates is up for grabs.

The CPD typically held the events closer to Election Day in November. The campaigns recognize, however, that voters can cast their ballots earlier via mail-in options, and want to get ahead of that. The CPD debates were independent, and various TV networks served as distributors, not organizers. The moderator was picked by the non-partisan organization. Big media companies have become the sources in 2024, using the debates to promote their own anchors and correspondents and get their trademarks and graphics picked up by rivals. They are even interrupting the flow of conversation with commercial breaks. After all, if a big-audience broadcast can’t generate revenue in the hard-knock era of streaming video and linear audience declines, what good is it?

ABC News’ decision had its detractors. Some Trump supporters felt Muir and Davis focused their fact-checks on Trump and not on Harris. During CNN’s post-event analysis, David Urban, a former Trump advisor, felt the moderators put Trump under a microscope that they didn’t use on Harris. Yet Scott Jennings, a conservative stalwart on CNN, told him that “It is a little hard to complain about the refs when you’re not making your own jump shots.”

The Disney-backed news outlet has new things to prove. This debate was ABC News’ first major event under Almin Karamehmedovic, who was named president of ABC News less than a month ago. It is also a major production under the auspices of Debra OConnell, who was elevated to lead both ABC stations and its national newsgathering business in February, and who has spent much of her time in recent months reconfiguring ABC News.

Whether ABC News’ leaning in will be emulated remains to be seen. Even so, at least one thing is clear: The rules that have governed presidential debates and other types of news specials have probably changed — permanently.