The MRC's Debate Histrionics
The Media Research Center covered up Donald Trump's poor performance at his debate with Kamala Harris by lashing out at the moderators both before and after the debate.
The Media Research Center just loves to play work-the-refs by attacking presidential debate moderators — something it never does when the moderators are from Fox News. It pushed that partisan strategy again ahead of the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Geoffrey Dickens ranted in a Sept. 6 post:
David Muir and Linsey Davis are set to moderate Tuesday night’s presidential debate but don’t expect a fair and balanced effort from the ABC anchors.
If their past reporting is any indication of how Muir and Davis will perform, debate viewers should expect their questions to frame Trump as a “racist” “white supremacist” who will restrict abortion “rights.” They will also set up Kamala Harris to position herself as a “glass-ceiling” breaker as well as a protector of “reproductive freedom.”
The following are just a few of the most obnoxious outbursts from Muir and Davis via the MRC’s archives:
Dickens didn’t dispute the accuracy of any claim that was made — indeed, Dickens was so desperate to smear that he raged against Muir daring to say nice things about former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev upon his death.
Alex Christy demanded that ABC asks Harris and Trump its laundry list of biased questions in a Sept. 8 post:
For the Dana Bash interview on CNN, we made a list of 30 questions we’d recommend to Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. CNN only touched on five of them, especially the fracking-ban question. Bash asked a very open-ended question on Harris and Biden’s mental decline.
Before Tuesday’s night’s big presidential debate, we’d like to reprise most of these questions and add a few ones based on the latest news. Harris-Walz is arguably the most liberal ticket ever, but they are trying desperately to cover that up, so here are a wide variety of 25 questions that moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis could ask that might actually help voters make an informed choice in a couple of months.
Christy’s questions were all button-pushing BS like “How can you claim to unite the country when you were named the most liberal senator in 2019?” and “How can voters trust you on the economy when even liberal Washington Post columnists are attacking your price control plan?” and “Did you really work at McDonald’s? You never mentioned it until you decided to run for president?”
Rich Noyes served up yet another garbage “study” in a Sept. 9 post:
Vice President Kamala Harris will meet former President Donald Trump tomorrow night for a debate hosted by ABC News, and she could not have chosen a friendlier forum for their first encounter. A new study by the Media Research Center finds that, of the Big Three evening newscasts, ABC’s World News Tonight — run by debate moderator David Muir — has been the most positive towards Harris and the most hostile to Trump.
MRC analysts reviewed all 100 campaign stories that aired on ABC’s World News Tonight from the day Harris entered the race (July 21) through September 6, including weekends. Our analysts found 25 clearly positive statements about Harris from reporters, anchors, voters or other non-partisan sources, with zero negative statements — none. That computes to a gravity-defying 100% positive spin score for the Vice President.
As for Trump, our analysts found just five clearly positive comments, vs. 66 negative statements, for a dismal 7 percent positive (93% negative) spin score.
As ConWebWatch has documented every time the MRC does one of these dishonest “studies,” Noyes’ work is slanted because, as he admits, it deliberately excludes “neutral statements” of the candidates — an omission seemingly designed to falsely inflate numbers, and it falsely portrays news coverage is being either positive or negative.
MRC chief Brent Bozell ran to right-wing Fox business to peddle his employees’ dishonest work, as lackey Tim Graham detailed:
On Debate Day, MRC founder and president L. Brent Bozell appeared on the Fox Business program Varney & Co. to discuss our latest research into ABC News coverage of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. On moderator David Muir’s newscast World News Tonight, MRC’s Rich Noyes found Harris drew 100 percent positive coverage (not including soundbites of partisans) and Trump’s coverage was 93 percent negative (by the same measure).
Fox host Stuart Varney said, “That doesn’t sound like it’s going to be a fair debate. What do you say?”
BOZELL: This is ABC, not necessarily David Muir. This is ABC, the network — and 93% negative on Donald Trump 100% positive to Kamala Harris. Why the Trump campaign agreed to do this debate on ABC, I simply don’t understand. Because It’s the worst, it’s the absolute worst network. The question is can David Muir be fair, tough, and even-handed in the debate?
I’ll give you an example of how easy it is to do it. Everyone is focused on immigration right now. If I were David Muir, I would turn to Donald Trump and say, “President Trump, you have advocated returning illegals back to Mexico. Explain yourself.” And when he did, turn to Kamala Harris and say “Vice President Harris, what’s your response to that?”. Then turn to Vice President Harris and say “You’ve advocated de-criminalizing people crossing the border illegally, explain yourself.” Then turn to Donald Trump and say “President Trump, respond.” Now this is just very simple and that would be a fantastic debate if they were to do it that way. Unfortunately, if past is prologue, it’s not going to happen.
Then Varney posited: “You can skew the debate by the issues you choose. I’d expect ABC tonight to skew heavily in favor of abortion. Several abortion questions because they think that’s a strong suit of Kamala Harris and skew the debate like that.”
Bozell responded that abortion is not an issue that most Americans care about (or prioritize), compared to other radical stands Harris has taken we found in our MRC poll of Biden voters, both Democrats and independents:
Of course, Graham amd Bozell are not going to concede that Noyes’ study is completely bogus, or that “our MRC poll of Biden voters” was conducted by Trump’s own election pollster, McLaughlin & Associates — which raises legitimate questions about its accuracy and bias — and was a push poll that raises questions about the MRC’s adherence to the guidelines on political activity that govern its IRS nonprofit status.
As the debate neared, the MRC continued its ref-working in a Sept. 10 post by Jorge Bonilla:
With the much-hyped presidential debate less than 24 hours away the Regime Media’s coverage are converging along similar lines, in a manner not unlike a group of Sunday congregants singing from the same hymnal.
Watch as debate co-moderator David Muir of ABC, now documented as the most pro-Harris, delivers his standalone introduction which could be a brief of the broader report:
[…]
Having concluded his minute-long introduction, Muir tosses to Mary Bruce. Bruce then goes into her report, and lays out a set of common themes. Harris landed in Philadelphia, Harris is feeling strong, Harris did extensive rehearsal, Trump said some incendiary thing.
Muir then tosses to Rachel Scott, for more on Trump’s debate prep. Muir then tosses to Rick Klein for poll numbers. And then a lengthy David Muir outro.
Over at CBS, Weijia Jiang echoed these same themes.
[…]
There is broad consensus that Harris is presenting herself as a change candidate, which is difficult to do while being the incumbent vice president. NBC is the only network to cover this angle.
Other than that, the Regime Media continue to sing Kamala Harris’s praises while looking at the same page of the same hymnal.
No, Jorge, Muir has not been “documented as the most pro-Harris” anchor — that’s based on a bogus study by your co-worker, so you’re apparently obligated to promote it no matter how bogus.
Nicholas Fondacaro whined:
In the run up to the first and possibly only debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris Tuesday night, CNN’s panel of purported journalists tacitly admitted that they favored debate rules that they thought favored Democrats. In this instance, they were collectively whining about ABC News carrying over CNN’s debate rule of muting the candidates’ microphones to prevent interruptions; something CNN was now against since the Harris campaign was against it.
Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, the moderators of CNN’s debate, essentially admitted that CNN created the muted mic rule at President Biden’s request because they thought it was helpful to the Democratic candidate. But now that it’s proven to hurt the Democrat, they were suddenly against their own rule:
Curtis Houck served up more ref-working by citing his employer’s bogus “study”:
With World News Tonight anchor David Muir co-moderating Tuesday’s presidential debate, co-hosting duties for the hour-long pre-game show fell to This Week co-hosts and longtime ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl and Martha Raddatz alongside chief White House correspondent Mary Bruce and senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott. Simply put, it was a disaster of the highest proportions.
From leftist fear-mongering to dismissal of the issues, ABC bolstered why we found their flagship evening newscast to be 100 percent positive toward Kamala Harris and 93 percent negative Kamala Harris. In essence, they set the table for what would be the worst presidential debate of all time that would transpire with Muir and ABC News Live anchor Linsey Davis.
Houck went on to dismiss Trump’s refusal to admit he lost in 2020 and his incitement of the Capitol riot as a result of that denial as “pesky issues” that don’t matter, which also included Trump’s hostile appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists (which, of course, the MRC defended).
Post-debate spin
After the debate — in which Harris did well and Trump was caught spouting more lies — the MRC predictably continued to lash out at ABC for pointing out those lies. Fondacaro huffed:
While the pundits argue over how the candidates performed Tuesday night, NewsBusters can say that the performance of the ABC moderators was abysmal as they forced former President Trump into a three-versus-one fight. The night was filled with contentious moments where the moderators took on Trump with slanted/combative questions and targeted him with six fact-checks, evening inviting Vice President Harris to take part in one. Meanwhile, Harris received ZERO fact-checks.
The first question to Trump came from World News Tonight anchor David Muir, who took Harris’s claims about Trump trade policy as fact and ridiculously asked him if he thought Americans could “afford” a 20 percent “national sales tax” he wasn’t proposing:
[…]
Of course, there was a question about January 6. “You did send out tweets but it was more than two hours before you sent out that video message telling your supporters to go home. Is there anything you regret about what you did on that day?” Muir sniped.
A few of their so-called ‘fact-checks’ lacked facts, making their actions worse than those of former CNN moderator Candy Crowley.
[…]
At one point, Muir invited Harris to take part in a fact check of her involvement with Ukraine negotiations; despite the fact she was about to get time to respond to him anyway.
And yet, Muir and Davis opted to not fact-check Harris on anything. By NewsBusters’ count there were at least 5 major and easily falsifiable claims made by the Vice President: She peddled the ‘very fine people on both sides ‘ hoax, the “bloodbath” hoax, tied Project 2025 to Trump, lied about Trump’s position on IVF, and falsely claimed no American troops where currently deployed to war zones (Iraq, Syria, the Red Sea, etc.).
In fact, the “very fine people” statement was not a hoax, and the “bloodbath hoax” was itself a hoax manufactured by the MRC.
Fondacaro needed a second post to spew all his rage about the debate not helping Trump:
ABC News could not be happier with how their three vs one presidential debate turned out, Tuesday night. Immediately following the conclusion of the event, the network’s panel of purported journalists were eager to show their excitement talk up Harris, who one host dubbed “the candidate of hope,” even touting a handshake she initiated.
“It’s a lively debate from the economy, to abortion, to Afghanistan. That had it all. And it was historic, Jon Karl, fiery,” boasted co-host Martha Raddatz. Chief Washington correspondent Jon Karl struggled to find the word, proclaiming: “Wow. Wow. Wow. That was quite a debate.”
Karl and Raddatz were joined by chief White House correspondent Mary Bruce, as the three of them gushed about Harris walking across the stage to shake Trump’s hand, and how it was all part of some elaborate plan she had:
[…]
Further, Raddatz opined about “what Kamala Harris wanted to do was be the candidate of hope, the candidate of the future,” while “Donald Trump seemed angry” and was falling for all of Harris’s traps:
Fondacaro didn’t refute anything the commentators said.
Bonilla served up similar ranting about coverage of the debate on another channel:
If the leader of North Korea were to give some sort of speech or participate in some multilateral event, one could reasonably expect the North Korean state media to gush to its captive audience about the Dear Leader’s muscular and virile performance. This is on par with MSNBC’s analysis at the conclusion of the debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Except, perhaps, that the North Koreans might be more restrained in their gushery. MSNBC began praising Dear Comrade Kamala as soon as ABC cut the feed. Lawrence O’Donnell praised Harris for shaking Trump’s hand.
[…]
No one should be shocked that MSNBC, as charter members of the Regime Media, marveled at ABC’s moderation of the debate which, it has to be said, WE WARNED YOU ABOUT. Naturally, the panel gushed over David Muir and Linsey Davis’s moderation which was so awful, one-sided and intrusive that Candy Crowley is now officially off the hook as worst moderator in recent memory, if not ever:
Bonilla is completely oblivious to the fact that in his reflexive bashing of channels for not being as far-right as Fox News and slavish devoting of right-wing, prop Trump talking points, he sounds much more like “North Korean state media” than the channels he’s bashing.
A couple hours later, Bonilla targeted yet another channel:
The Regime Media regimed very hard whilst covering the second first presidential debate of this election cycle, between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. The Tiffany Network was no exception.
[…]
All in all, CBS was exultant about Harris’s performance on the debate stage, and made no effort whatsoever to modulate that…joy.
Bonilla, of course, is sour that his guy did so poorly — but he’s not going to mention that this is all performative outrage because he and the MRC will become “Regime Media” if Trump wins and he is fake-regiming very hard in anticipation of that.
And just as he did after CNN’s interview with Harris, Christy wailed that ABC almost completely ignored the laundry list of biased, right-wing questions he demanded that the moderators ask Harris:
On Friday, we published a list of 25 questions that ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis should ask Vice President Kamala Harris at Tuesday’s debate with former President Donald Trump. However, the duo would ask only two of them.
On the good side of the list, Davis asked, “I do want to ask, would you support any restrictions on a woman’s right to an abortion?”
Much later, Davis would ask, “In 2017, you supported Bernie Sanders’ proposal to do away with private insurance and create a government-run health care system. Two years later, you proposed a plan that included a private insurance option. What is your plan today?”
ABC also rehashed Harris’s past positions on the border and fracking that were on our previous list of questions that CNN’s Dana Bash should ask Harris.
The bad came when Muir asked, “I want to get your thoughts on support for Ukraine in this moment. But also, as commander-in-chief, if elected, how would you deal with Vladimir Putin, and would it be any different from what we’re seeing from President Biden?”
Curiously, Christy never demanded that any specific questions be asked of Trump during the debate. Wonder why…
Graham served up a hypocritical labeling complaint in his Sept. 11 column:
Even battle-hardened conservatives can find it shocking when Democrat-boosting reporters fail to identify Kamala Harris as a “liberal,” or a “progressive,” or even dare one say it, a “left-wing radical.”
In a new Media Research Center study of ABC’s World News Tonight since Harris was anointed in a back room as Biden’s replacement on July 21, Rich Noyes discovered ABC’s evening-news crew has never applied an ideological label to her. In Kamala’s first week as the nominee, CBS cited her “liberal voting record” and NBC reported she was a “self-described progressive prosecutor.”
But through September 4, ABC’s correspondents never called Harris either a “liberal” or a “progressive.” Instead, eight stories included clips of Republicans (usually Donald Trump) attacking Harris’s liberal record. The ABC team also never criticized Harris’s handling of top issues like painful inflation or illegal immigration.
One way that liberal journalists put a protective bubble around their candidate is to pretend she’s somehow above ideology. They only suggest that this is an attack coming from Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, and therefore it’s just negative advertising, not news.
[…]
San Francisco-based reporter Marisa Lagos began: “Trump didn’t mince words at the Economic Club of New York last week, making false claims about Harris and her record.” Trump called her a “Marxist” who nearly destroyed San Francisco. But nowhere in this story is there a “liberal,” or ”progressive,” or “radical.”
But there are two references to “conservative media”!
The MRC loves to indiscriminately label everything that’s only slightly less conservative than it as “left-wing,” and rarely labels its fellow right-wingers with an accurate moniker, so he’s clearly showing a double standard.
Curtis Houck returned to his employer-mandated work-the-refs narrative that the debate’s ABC moderators were irredeemably biased ans whined it was pointed out that Trump got owned by Harris:
Following what can safely be placed at the top of the worst presidential debates ever given the election interference by ABC News’s questioning and open liberal partisanship by moderators Linsey David and David Muir, Wednesday’s Good Morning America was bursting at the seams over Vice President Harris “confron[ting] Donald Trump” (along with Muir and Davis) and putting him “on defense” throughout the “fierce and fiery face-off.”
In other words, we told you so about Muir and ABC.
“Breaking overnight, their first debate. Kamala Harris confronts Donald Trump. Breaking overnight, the vice president and former president meet for the first time at the ABC News presidential debate,” co-host and former Clinton official George Stephanopoulos announced in a tease.
After co-host Michael Strahan led off by touting Harris shaking Trump’s hand, Stephanopoulos gushed this was her “clearly signaling there that she wanted to take command, kicking off 90 minutes of confrontation” that had “Trump on defense for most of the night” and claimed polls overwhelmingly call Harris the winner.
[…]Bruce also complained Trump was the one who “[got] personal” (although Harris, among other lines, brought up claims of sexual misconduct against Trump) and forced to discuss “statements questioning Harris’ racial identity”.
On the argument between Trump and Muir about 2020, Bruce waved the proverbial pom-poms to boast “Harris us[ed] the moment to call Trump unqualified.”
Houck didn’t dispute anything Muir said.
It took both Tom Olohan and Gabriela Pariseau to complain that “ABC hosts and debate moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis asked at least 27 questions of former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris but not a single one touched on freedom of speech or censorship.” As ConWebWatch has noted, the MRC considers correcting lies and misinformation to be “censorship.”
Bozell took his whining about the debate to a right-wing radio show:
On Wednesday, MRC founder and president L. Brent Bozell appeared on WMAL’s O’Connor and Company to break down ABC’s awful debate moderator performance put in by anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis.
Bozell told the O’Connor and Company’s Julie Gunlock and Andrew Langer that the hatchet job by the moderators was expected: “Speaking for the Media Research Center — we weren’t in the slightest bit surprised at what happened last night.” Bozell added that Trump has “Gone through it with every network but ABC has clearly been the worst all along.”
Bozell didn’t pull any punches as he blasted: “Let me tell you something, whoever it was on the Trump campaign who selected ABC should be fired this morning….The President said last night ‘You should fire incompetent staff,’ this was an incompetent staff.”
[…]
Bozell continued: “ABC gave her 100 percent positive news. At the same time, when Donald Trump is gaining in the polls, when Donald Trump has a magnificent convention. When Donald Trump — damn it — is shot in the head 93 percent negative coverage. And someone said “Let’s do an interview on — let’s do, let’s do a debate on ABC because it’s going to be fair.”
The anonymous writer of this post failed to label O’Connor as a right-winger, further proving the MRC’s hypocrisy on labeling.
Fondacaro applied his employer-mandated narrative to his daily hate-watch of “The View”:
The Cackling Coven of ABC’s The View was extremely happy with the way their network’s 3-on-1 presidential debate turned out the previous night. According to their oh-so-insightful analysis, Vice President Harris doomed former President Trump just by initiating a handshake as they walked on stage. But even an anti-Trumper, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie tapped the brakes on their hot take.
The liberal ladies were already several minutes into their gushing when moderator Whoopi Goldberg asked if they wanted to see her recreation of walkout and handshake. “I need to see it!” proclaimed faux conservative Alyssa Farah Griffin. “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah,” agreed pretend independent Sara Haines. “The walk out was the best!” added staunchly racist and anti-Semitic co-host Sunny Hostin (the descendant of slave owners).
[…]
Goldberg added: “Because she said to him, ‘you want to say something to me, say it to my face!’ And she put her face right there and he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t do it.”
Fondacaro never disputed the accuracy of the hosts’ views, and Hostin’s lawyers are certainly happy he provided yet another example of his maliciously false smears of her to use in her eventual defamation lawsuit against him.
Graham returned to whine further about the debate outcome in his Sept. 11 podcast:
Wow! ABC’s presidential debate was remarkably skewed. Donald Trump drew specific hardball questions. Kamala Harris drew vague, open-ended softballs. Trump was “fact checked” six times. Harris never was. When you think the point of being a professional journalist is to Destroy Trump, of course you’re going to be proud of this debate moderation.
Senior research analyst Bill D’Agostino joins the show to underline how ABC defines “professionalism.” We wanted to apologize for saying in pre-debate interviews that maybe ABC would be like Jake Tapper and Dana Bash were on CNN for the Trump-Biden debate in June.
The worst part was asking Harris “questions” that sounded like “your turn. Go.” Harris clearly had pre-rehearsed answers. So vague questions made it easier to dodge and launch into the boilerplate. On Afghanistan, they asked “do you believe you bear any responsibility in the way that withdrawal played out?
After challenging Trump about his insults at a National Association of Black Journalists event about Harris “deciding to be black,” then they simply asked her “your thoughts on this?” We wanted Trump to point to the moderators and say to Harris, “why are you afraid of an interview with these two Democrats?”
Of course, CNN’s Daniel Dale asserted that Trump had lied about 33 times during the debate, and Harris had maybe one. She was “overwhelmingly factual.” This is the PolitiFact tilt on CNN. Going into the debate, PolitiFact dumped 199 “Pants on Fire” articles on Trump. Harris has zero. She was elected Attorney General of California in 2011, but it’s zero over the last 13 years.
Jeffrey Lord also spouted the mandated right-wing narrative in his Sept. 14 column:
It wasn’t a hard call.
At this point in the history of televised debates, a history that began with the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates ( 64 years ago!!) and has continued on with a seemingly endless stream of both Republican vs. Democrat nominee debates plus Republican vs. Republican and Democrat vs. Democrat nomination debates, one would think ABC would have learned a thing or two.
But, alas, no.
The result of the much ballyhooed ABC Trump vs. Harris debate was, well aside from the verdict on the candidates themselves, a bursting of the liberal media bubble.
[…]
With that history behind them, how could this 2024 Trump-Harris presidential debate result in such a blizzard of criticism? Criticism targeted at both the network itself and the debate moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis?
The answer is not hard to figure out if outside the bubble that is the liberal media.
The answer is that as the two moderators, their staff and network executives prepped for the debate, any sign of anti-Trump bias and pro-Harris bias was simply not recognized. Why? Because the moderators, staff and network executives themselves all operate in a liberal media bubble where anti-Trump bias is not seen as bias. Any criticism of Harris is seen as out of bounds – racist, sexist yada yada yada.
With that being the case, Muir and Davis were headed for a sure-thing media car wreck – because the country as a whole is not living and working 24/7 in the liberal media bubble. So when the two drilled in on Trump – but would not treat Harris in the same relentless critical fashion – millions of Americans noticed.
Unfortunately for Lord, he’s trapped in the right-wing media bubble and thinks anything that doesn’t advance his preferred narratives is “liberal.”
Meanwhile, Larry Elder stuck so slavishly to the mandated narrative in his Sept. 15 column that he parroted the MRC, touting how “the conservative Media Research Center accused ABC of having the most biased of the three big networks’ nightly news programs.” He didn’t mention, of course, that the MRC’s research is biased and shoddy — doing that would violate the mandate, after all.
Missing from all of these posts, though, is any acknowledgement that Trump did poorly in the debate. MRC employees are not allowed to disparage their god, after all.