Media Bias in the Presidential Debate

Why wouldn't there be bias?

MAGA people and others critical of Kamala Harris and the Democrats as a whole have been complaining bitterly about a bias against Donald Trump that they identified in the conduct of the ABC-TV journalists David Muir and Linsey Davis when presenting questions at the presidential debate on Tuesday. It’s said that the moderators corrected more of Trump’s false statements than Harris’s; that the contest was “three against one”; etc. Not just unfair, non-objective, and biased, the thinking goes on, Muir and Davis revealed a corrupt establishment compact between the Democratic Party and a supposedly all-powerful media, the very corruption that Trump is supposedly crusading to bring down.

I too think a significant and undeniable bias prevailed in how ABC ran that debate. But it’s not the bias the MAGA people are talking about. And among the MAGA people with brains, I think that despite the sputtering righteousness of their indignation (check out Megyn Kelly’s show for a fine example), they know it and expect to benefit.

In this televised event called a presidential debate, which networks and cable channels present as an important news broadcast, featuring themselves, there’s naturally going to be a pretty blatant bias against spouts of deranged ranting and in favor of the traditional, familiar, at times pretty canned, banal, and not always perfectly accurate discourse of an ordinary candidate. In what universe wouldn’t there be this bias? It’s a preference for a relatively normal style over a style that goes out of its way to break all norms of “the presidential debate,” which is a phenomenon that has no history in our politics prior to the advent of television, was invented by CBS News in 1960, and is designed to make TV news look serious and useful to public engagement.

Trump didn’t just utter more falsehoods than Harris. The kind of discourse he favors—the paranoid “they’re eating the dogs, the cats!” or even the preening “I created one of the greatest economies in the history of our country”—are dramatic, bombastic, explosive, boasting, out of hand; they violate, by intent, the show’s basic style, which was accepted in every one of these events before 2016 and has never had any problem accommodating comparatively boring tactics, like Harris’s taking some of Trump’s statements out of context and exaggerating Democrats’ successes.

So, yeah: there’s gonna be bias. The event in its very essence favors the normal, easily manageable stuff that, though not always super-edifying, candidates have always said. The event reacts, in its very essence, against a geyser of self-involved freakishness that nobody knows how to handle.

Nobody’s supposed to know how to handle that geyser. That’s the whole point of the geyser approach, but in the face of these mad onslaughts of mayhem, the moderators have no choice but to keep playing their part, as if this were really a sober and important event. As if, under more normal circumstances, it once really was. As if it hasn’t always been a form of reality TV, a process of degrading our presidential politics, with results evident in the accession of Donald Freaking Trump to the presidency of the United States. Every time he starts talking in that format, the whole thing breaks down into the absurdity it really is, which is made more absurd by the moderators’ weak attempts to keep it not absurd, plus a proliferation of commentators, across the board, perpetuating their own supposed expertise by assessing who supposedly did what and what it supposedly means.

All of which makes the debates better reality TV than they were before.

And if you like Donald Trump, isn’t this exactly what you like about him?

He didn’t come to that event to make a case. He came to burn down the house, for the enjoyment and excitement of his fans. All it takes is a little “er, mister former president, it’s not cool to burn down the house…,” from people who have no choice but to keep believing they’re legitimate fire marshals, and every pyromaniac out there starts crying “three against one, no fair!” If you like Trump—or maybe it’s more like if you hate Harris—I know you’re not really righteously indignant over the presence of bias in the debate. Where you sit, it all works out perfectly: the madness, the unfairness of it all, perfectly self-fulfilling, perfectly self-evident, perfectly unarguable.