By Mike Gonzalez | Washington Examiner
In 2012, CNN’s Candy Crowley became the standard for biased, meddling debate moderators when she corrected then-Republican candidate Mitt Romney in his second debate with former President Barack Obama rather than remaining impartial and letting the two presidential candidates duke it out.
Crowley, however, was a paragon of neutrality compared to the disgraceful performance by ABC’s moderators at this week’s debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
There is a reason Crowley is remembered. Referring to the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Romney said it had taken Obama “14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi an act of terror.”
Crowley interjected, “He did call it an act of terror.”
But when Obama did mention the word, it wasn’t even clear that he was referring to Benghazi — and if he was, why did it take him two weeks, as Romney pointed out? Crowley’s intrusion was a big help to Obama at a key moment.
As even the very progressive Columbia Journalism Review put it at the time, “President Obama’s reelection campaign was in trouble. He had just turned in a listless debate performance” in the first encounter with Romney. Crowley’s timely tag-out became a turning point.
Romney, now a senator, was still sore years later. “I don’t think it’s the role of the moderator in a debate to insert themselves into the debate and to declare a winner or a loser on a particular point,” the Columbia Journalism Review quoted him as saying years later.
That happened in spades at this week’s debate between Trump and Harris. ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis kept intruding repeatedly by disputing the points Trump was trying to make and never did the same to Harris.
They became as much the story as the debate itself and are now the standard-bearers for unfair political refereeing.
The interruptions started when Trump said that a former governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, had said that some states would let babies who survived abortions die. Quoting Northam, Trump said, “‘The baby will be born, and we will decide what to do with the baby.’ In other words, we’ll execute the baby.”
Davis sharply cut in, “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”
But, like Crowley, Davis was wrong. Here’s what Northam said in 2020 to a radio interviewer. You judge: “If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”
Plus, some states do allow babies to die after surviving a botched abortion, including Minnesota, where Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, is governor. As my colleague Roger Severino noted in real time during the debate:
Trump was 100% correct. Post-birth abortion is real and Harris-Walz support it. At least 5 babies were born alive after botched abortions and left to die under Walz’s watch. Two of these struggling babies were given “comfort care” instead of medical care allegedly in violation of state law. How did Walz respond? By repealing the very law exposing and outlawing this horror and replacing it with abortion-on-demand on the front end, and infanticide on the back end.
Severino, a Heritage Foundation vice president, also offered in his post on X what he called “the bone chilling receipts.”
And it was downhill from there.
When Trump said, “Crime in this country is through the roof,” Muir again objected, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”
But as we and many others have pointed out, these FBI statistics are very suspect. John R. Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, wrote this month that the FBI’s reporting is actually the product of a dramatic drop in reported crimes. “All these numbers are from the FBI’s look at reported crimes, and as law enforcement has collapsed, the rate at which crimes have gone unreported has increased,” he said.
Trump himself tried to make this point to Muir, saying that the FBI “didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud.” But Trump shouldn’t have been debating Muir; the public had tuned in to watch him and Harris debate each other.
All in all, there were five so-called fact checks of this type against Trump and six presses for follow-ups and zero of either against Harris. “Those two moderators tried to sink Donald Trump tonight,” spat out an exasperated Megyn Kelly. “I don’t remember a single fact check of anything she said, and she lied repeatedly. She just got away with it.”
Kelly is right. Harris, for example, claimed at one point that, “The United States Supreme Court recently ruled that the former president would essentially be immune from any misconduct if he were to enter the White House again.”
That’s not what the court said in Trump v. United States. Chief Justice John Roberts even wrote, “The president enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official. The President is not above the law.”
Harris also claimed that the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership calls for a complete ban on abortion, which is an easily provable lie. Heritage President Kevin Roberts tweeted instantly, “@VP Harris is a liar. Mandate for Leadership does not call for a national abortion ban or pregnancy monitors.”
All this was an unnecessary detraction, one that was so obvious it might provoke sympathy for Trump with the public. If they gave an award for most biased moderating, Muir and Davis would have won “the Crowley.”
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo Senior Fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation and author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its Board of Trustees.