Editorial | Were ABC’s moderators harder on Trump?

During Tuesday’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, ABC’s moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis introduced an element to the debate that was absent from Trump’s faceoff with Biden on CNN — mid-debate fact-checking.

While no two moderators could possibly fact-check every falsity made throughout the debate, Muir and Davis did call out a few more blatantly incorrect statements from the candidates — namely Trump’s claims about Haitian immigrants in Springfield eating residents’ pets and post-birth abortions in which doctors execute babies after they are born. The former is a racist hoax spread online and the latter is laughably incorrect. 

Though the moderators did affirm some of Trump’s arguments — for example, Muir acknowledged that the Biden administration kept many of Trump’s tariffs — many people online felt that the two were unfairly harder on Trump than they were on Harris, with some calling it a “3 vs 1.”

The posts began with racist remarks against Davis ranging from outright slurs to calling Davis a “DEI hire,” despite her two decades of journalistic experience. Conservatives also dug up information that Harris and Davis were sorority sisters in Alpha Kappa Alpha at Howard University, ignoring that the two attended the college 13 years apart, and there is no evidence they had formerly met aside from a previous ABC interview.

The Vice President certainly lied several times during the debate and was not corrected by the moderators, but it’s worth noting that most of these lies were context-dependent and not as unambiguously incorrect as suggesting that it is legal to kill a baby after it is born. 

Debate moderators and the public as a whole have a duty to cultivate an informed voting population. No candidate will ever tell the whole truth during a debate — as sad as it is to say — but Trump chose to make bold claims that often had no semblance of accuracy, inviting the moderators to set the record straight.

Live fact-checking is already a feature of many news stations’ coverage of presidential debates. It’s unlikely to go anywhere, and mid-debate fact-checking like we saw on Tuesday night may become more common in moderation of future debates. If the candidates don’t want to get corrected live on-air, it will serve them well to tell the truth — or at least do a better job at hiding their lies.