CNN pulled off Thursday night’s debate in Atlanta without any notable glitches. Both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump followed the debate rules, which included no studio audience and a muted microphone while the other was speaking.
“I know that CNN wanted the focus to be on the candidates, not the moderators and that’s exactly how it turned out,” said Brian Stelter, CNN’s former longtime media critic let go in 2022 by Chris Licht, who was replaced as CNN chief by Mark Thompson last year.
Stelter felt the debate moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash asked “sharp and substantive” questions. “Trump and Biden were both challenged over and over again,” he said. “That’s a sign of a great debate.”
According to Nielsen numbers released Thursday, 51.3 million viewed the debate, which aired not just on CNN but also simulcast on most major broadcast networks and cable news networks. That figure is way down from 73.1 million who saw the first debate between the two men in 2020 though this debate occurred more than two months earlier than has been typical in a presidential election cycle. CNN said it was the largest livestreamed event in CNN’s history and given the simulcast nature of the debate, CNN’s highest rated program in its 44-year history.
There were plenty of critics who found the format problematic since it was clear Tapper and Bash were told not to fact check the candidates in real time.
“One of our most basic functions as journalists is to operate as truth tellers,” said Roland Martin, a former CNN contributor who now runs his own daily news and commentary broadcast out of Washington, D.C. “That requires us to let the American people know when someone is lying.”
To him, fact-checking later or just on social media, as CNN did, was ineffective: “I don’t understand why CNN chose to do that.”
Tom Farmer, a former CNN producer from 1984 to 1996, said CNN was in a “total no-win situation” given the candidates they were dealing with but felt “the format was fair. They did not lose control the way Chris Wallace and Kaitlan Collins did with past live Trump events.”
By muting the microphones while the other candidate was talking, there was minimal cross talk and interruptions like those that marred the first debate in 2020 moderated by Wallace. And CNN and Collins were pilloried last year when the live audience frequently disrupted a CNN led Trump town hall.
Farmer recalled when Candy Crowley, CNN’s former chief political correspondent who worked at the network from 1987 to 2014, moderated a debate and corrected several inaccuracies on the fly.
The result? “She was crucified by critics who said the moderator’s job is not that of a schoolmarm. I stand with those who say it’s the combatant’s job to call each other out. Last night, they mostly didn’t do it so why should the moderators step in?”
While CNN has previously hosted primary debates, this is the first time the news operation singularly organized a presidential debate.
Frank Sesno, executive director of the George Washington University Alliance for a Sustainable Future and a former CNN White House correspondent, called it a “home run for CNN,” praising the moderators as businesslike and in charge, the set spare and clean and the production professional and glitch free.
“It served to remind people that CNN is still about the news,” he said. “Whether its ratings have lagged or the audience has split up into ideological camps, last night showed it can still put together a first-class tentpole news event.”
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