ABC News moderator Linsey Davis, one of two journalists overseeing last week’s presidential debate, admitted in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that the plan was to fact-check only former President Donald Trump, not Vice President Kamala Harris.
The acknowledgment came after widespread criticism of the moderators’ approach during the debate.
As Breitbart News noted, Davis and her co-moderator, David Muir, fact-checked Trump multiple times—seven, to be exact—but never once fact-checked Harris, even when she repeated false claims like the debunked “very fine people” narrative from Charlottesville.
Davis explained that the decision to focus on Trump was deliberate, rooted in the belief that he had been allowed to make unchallenged statements in a previous CNN debate against President Joe Biden in late June.
The moderators and ABC News felt the need to prevent a similar situation where Trump’s statements might go unchecked by his opponent or the moderators.
The New York Post also reported on Davis’s comments, highlighting her rationale for the decision.
In her interview with the Los Angeles Times, Davis discussed how Trump’s previous debate performance influenced her approach to moderation.
“People were concerned that statements were allowed to just hang and not [be] disputed by the candidate Biden, at the time, or the moderators,” Davis said.
She further explained that her goal was to ensure that Trump’s claims were addressed in real-time, a strategy designed to avoid what many critics saw as a lack of scrutiny during the earlier CNN debate.
Davis and Muir’s fact-checks of Trump were frequent and at times incorrect, according to critics, yet they made no similar attempts to challenge Harris on several occasions.
Despite this, neither moderator stepped in to address Harris’s continued use of the false narrative.
Davis also revealed that the moderators had prepared by reviewing past statements made by both candidates, assuming that they would repeat familiar talking points.
“Politicians tend to say the same things again and again,” she told the Times.
Despite this preparation, they somehow overlooked the need to fact-check Harris’s use of debunked stories.
This was not the first time that the “fine people” hoax had gone unchallenged.
Biden himself had repeated the claim during his June debate against Trump, and CNN moderators similarly chose not to fact-check him on it.
Harris, like Biden, has used the Charlottesville hoax as part of her campaign messaging, which further fueled criticism of the debate moderators for allowing such misinformation to go unchecked.
The controversy surrounding the selective fact-checking in the debate has added to concerns over media bias, with critics arguing that holding one candidate to a different standard undermines the integrity of the debate format.
Davis’s admission has intensified these criticisms, raising questions about the fairness and impartiality of the event.
