Victor Davis Hanson
13. Blowing up the Debates. In 2024, the Commission on Presidential Debates crashed because it could never assure the two parties that selecting the candidates on the stage, the moderators, the time, the place, and the rules were truly non-partisan as advertised. Do we remember the 2012 hijacking of the debate by the Obama-partisan Candy Crowley who falsely fact-checked Mitt Romney and destroyed the tempo of the entire debate? Or the preponderance of liberal journalists and host stations?
So given that ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN, and PBS were liberal or hard-left, and only Fox and Newsmax were conservative, it was hard to find an ideological balance.
Nonetheless, this year there were three debates, CNN: Biden versus Trump; ABC: Trump versus Harris; CBS: Walz versus Vance. All three were biased and train wrecks.
The CNN debate—never had a debate taken place before the nomination of either candidate or the respective conventions—was set up to be a stress test for Joe Biden. The plan was to bait Trump into accepting the Democratic offer.
Once he foolishly agreed to it on leftwing CNN, the Democratic insider cabal informed Biden that if he crashed in his stress-test debate, then the Democrats would now have time to drop his nomination, invalidate 14 million primary voters, coronate Harris, get a prearranged nod convention vote for Harris, and put her name on the ballots.
And Biden did just that. By imploding on stage, he prompted the anticipated Democratic coup which substituted Harris for the president as the nominee. Trump’s substantial lead in the polls evaporated as the Democrats warped the debate occasion to stage a veritable coup.
In the second ABC debate, the moderators Muir and Davis fact-checked only Trump, usually wrongly, and demanded follow-up, stay-on-the-topic answers from Trump alone. They chose debate topics that played into the therapeutic Kamala.
By the time of the final CBS debate (Walz versus Vance), popular outrage had forced moderators O’Donnell and Brennan to promise in advance that there would be no fact-checking and an unbiased protocol. And yet, once more the moderators broke their promise and ruined the debate—fact-checking nonetheless and doing so to Vance alone. Ignoring for the most part crime, foreign policy, inflation, and energy, the moderators of course obsessed over abortion, climate change, and January 6th.
At about the same time, CBS’s 60 Minutes was found to have doctored the transcript of its Harris interview, and predictably so to make her seem less silly and lost.
Trump did not agree to a comparable interview because in 2020 CBS had used the interview to lambast Trump for claiming (truly and accurately) that Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop was genuine (proven so by the FBI).
Instead, interviewer Leslie Stahl had brazenly lied that there was no such evidence of its authenticity and in the ensuing four years had never apologized for promulgating such untruth in the critical days before the election.
In sum, the media in general and the idea of presidential televised events in particular, are now largely discredited. Both entities cannot be trusted. Moderators and journalists cannot be relied upon to conduct themselves in a professional manner. They seem more at home in a Pravda autocracy or third-world dictatorship than operating as a time-honored American disinterested and transparent media.
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