In the wake of the latest presidential debate, a Republican senator has launched a significant effort to hold ABC News accountable, alleging bias in its moderation of the event. The debate, held on September 10, saw Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump face off in a high-stakes encounter that captured the nation’s attention. Following the debate, Trump criticized the event as “rigged,” asserting that he performed “great” despite facing a “3-to-1” disadvantage.
On Wednesday, Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) accused ABC News of favoring Harris by being openly partisan before the debate even commenced. The lawmaker is now demanding that the network disclose any pre-debate communications with Harris’ campaign, intensifying scrutiny over the fairness and impartiality of major media outlets in political coverage.
“On debate night, it became abundantly clear that ABC News and its respective moderators had a biased agenda,” Sen. Marshall said in a letter to ABC News President Almin Karamehmedovic and Harris’ campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodriguez.
“Over 67 million Americans watched as a policy exchange between two presidential candidates quickly turned into a three-on-one debate against the Republican nominee,” Marshall elaborated in the letter which was initially reported by NewsNation. “I’m just saying what the average Americans are saying that I represent the entire state of Kansas, and these are the questions that people are asking back home,” Marshall said to the outlet.
“The American people deserve transparency and accountability from the mainstream media and a full accounting of whether ABC News coordinated with the Harris campaign to skew the debate’s questions and fact-checking in favor of the Vice President,” the letter read.
In response to the letter from Wednesday, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Delaware, remarked, “You know that a game didn’t go well for a team if, two weeks later, they’re still complaining about the calls the refs made. No disrespect to Sen. Marshall, but this seems to me to be further proof that Vice President Harris had a dominant and successful performance at that debate if he’s still questioning the refs,” Coons claimed.
Following the debate, however, ABC’s “World News Tonight” with anchor David Muir has experienced a notable dip in viewers. The program averaged 6.7 million viewers for the episodes on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday post-debate, down from its 2024 average of 7.6 million prior to the debate according to The New York Post. The 12% drop in viewership for “World News Tonight” was significantly sharper than the minor decreases seen by “CBS Evening News” and “NBC Nightly News” during the same period, though Muir’s newscast remained the leading evening newscast.
“All of the noise that you hear afterward about which candidate won the debate, did the moderators win or lose, that’s just noise,” ABC’s David Muir said on ‘Live with Kelly and Mark’ on Monday. “The most important thing to remember is that you all have the power. Everybody at home has the power.”
During the debate, moderators Muir and Linsey Davis took the controversial step of fact-checking former President Trump, interrupting him to “correct” his statements in real time for viewers, while failing to fact-check Vice President Kamala Harris.
The approach differed significantly from the first presidential debate of the 2024 season on CNN, where moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash allowed both Trump and Joe Biden to speak without on-the-spot corrections, opting instead to address inaccuracies in an online and televised fact-check after the event. The aggressive fact-checking by ABC suggested bias, contrasting sharply with CNN’s less intrusive method during the high-stakes telecast. ABC’s moderators displayed a noticeable restraint with Harris, avoiding any significant confrontations.
