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Late last week, during an event that was loosely described as a “news conference,” Donald Trump did what he often does: say something accidentally revealing in the middle of a rambling and incoherent rant. Trump accused his political opponents of “playing the ref” by criticizing the judge who threw out one of the criminal cases against him, but then appeared to praise Bobby Knight—the late college basketball coach, who once endorsed Trump—for his skill in doing just that. “Nobody did it better than the late, great Bobby Knight,” Trump said. “He would scream at those refs and everything and said—they say, ‘Bobby, you’re not going to get the decision,’ and he’d say, ‘Yep, but the next one, I will.’ And he was right.”
Trump and his allies, of course, have themselves spent years playing—or, in more common parlance, working—the refs, not least in the media, screaming at and about any coverage they deem to be unfair. I’m not a big fan of applying sporting analogies to media coverage and discussions thereof; they can occasionally be insightful, but too often cheapen political journalism, in particular, by treating serious matters like a game. Still, if such analogies are to be used, the closest thing that political journalism has to “refs” is, perhaps, the moderators of presidential debates. These moderators don’t always see their role in terms of calling balls and strikes: when Trump debated Joe Biden in June, the host network, CNN, suggested ahead of time that it would not fact-check the pair in real time, and stuck to that promise; media critics (myself included) complained, but this approach was at least consistent with debates past. In the (apologies) “pregame” coverage of yesterday’s debate between Trump and Kamala Harris on ABC, however, Rick Klein, that network’s political director, did not rule it out. “I don’t think it’s a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ proposition,” he told the New York Times. “We’re not making a commitment to fact-check everything, or fact-check nothing, in either direction.”
In the context of the pre-debate coverage, this remark was little more than a subplot for media nerds. But it suggested, to me at least, that ABC intended to handle the debate differently, and so it proved: according to a count in the Washington Post, the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, called out or clarified five egregious lies that were told on the stage, all of them out of Trump’s mouth. After Trump claimed, during a segment on abortion, that certain Democratic governors have supported executing babies after they’re born, Davis noted that this is not legal in any state; after Trump referenced a viral conspiracy theory that immigrants are consuming people’s pets—“THEY’RE EATING THE DOGS!” Trump exclaimed, “THEY’RE EATING THE CATS!”—Muir said that ABC had investigated the claim and been told by a local official that it wasn’t credible. (“Well,” Trump interjected, before offering another of those accidentally revealing statements, “the people on television say, My dog was taken and used for food.”) Muir also clarified things that Trump said about the crime rate and his persistent false claims that the last election was stolen.
All of this upset allies of Trump. A lot. They said that the moderators had acted “as agents of the Harris campaign” by fact-checking Trump and not her (Trump adviser David Bossie); that the “hack moderators” had allowed Harris to “lie nonstop” (Trump son Don Jr.); that the moderators were a “disgrace” (pundit Ben Shapiro) and an “embarrassment” to their profession (Senator Marco Rubio); that the whole thing was “one of the most biased, unfair debates I have ever seen” (Megyn Kelly); that it wasn’t a debate at all, but a “public show trial where the judge, jury, and executioner is ABC News” (Charlie Kirk); and that ABC’s broadcast license should be revoked and its moderators and executives criminally prosecuted for “campaign finance fraud” (Federalist CEO Sean Davis). Ref-working seems far too mild an analogy for some of this rhetoric, but at least one right-wing critic did stick to sports in his analysis: Clay Travis likened the debate to “a game when an obvious and clear officiating error is the primary story after the game. It’s all that is going to be talked about.”
Predictably, the Trump campaign talked about it, too, describing the debate as a three-on-one against their candidate. So, too, did the candidate himself. In fairness to Trump, he started trying to work the refs at ABC before the debate even began, describing the network as “FAKE NEWS” and “by far the nastiest and most unfair newscaster in the business,” and pointing to Harris’s friendship with a senior executive at Disney, which owns ABC. (The pair are close, but ABC News has said that the executive has no say in editorial matters.) After the debate, Trump paid the refs—okay, the wider assembled media this time—a visit, heading into the “spin room” where candidates’ allies (but not, typically, candidates themselves) make the case that their person won. “It was the best debate I’ve ever had,” Trump said, contradicting a quickly gathering media consensus that it may have been his worst. Per the Times, he “largely stuck to the same points, like insisting that ABC News and the moderators had been unfair.” Asked by Sean Hannity, of Fox News, whether he’ll do another debate, Trump said (of Harris), “You know what happens when you’re a prizefighter, and you lose? You immediately want a new fight.” He added that he might take part if it were on “a fair network.”
If right-wingers blasted the moderators for fact-checking Trump, various journalists and media critics—some of whom have often been sharply critical of mainstream coverage of Trump and his rhetoric—praised them for the same, and for their broader handling of the debate. David Folkenflik, a media reporter at NPR, tweeted during the debate that the fact-checking to that point had been “focused, crisp and brief, so it doesn’t feel as though it’s interfering”; writing in Slate afterward, Justin Peters declared the debate the “best-moderated” of the Trump era. But Peters also acknowledged that this was “a low bar to clear,” and other observers seemed to agree. “One way to look at it: ABC moderators fact-checked Trump 2-3 times and Harris zero times,” The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta wrote. “Another way to look at it: ABC moderators fact-checked Trump 2-3 times instead of 500 times.” This may have been an exaggeration, but fact-checkers at major outlets agreed after the debate that Trump had said many more false things than Harris. (On CNN, Daniel Dale put his preliminary count at thirty-three to one, adding that he didn’t have enough time to run through each Trump falsehood.) Others criticized the moderators for letting Trump speak more than Harris. (By CNN’s count, Trump talked for five more minutes than Harris in total.)
I would agree that we’re talking about a low bar here. Some bizarre Trump statements—his claim that Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens who are in prison”; his muddled reference to “Abdul,” the head of the Taliban—went without a fact-check from the moderators; they asked some important questions, including about January 6 and democracy, but when they posed a question about Trump’s recent, overt threat to prosecute anyone he perceives as having cheated in the election, it went to Harris, not Trump. Muir and Davis also asked Harris about some of her inconsistent stances on policy, but did not always follow up.
Still, ABC does deserve praise for clearing this bar at all, where other networks have failed. The pundit Nate Silver suggested afterward that its inclusion of fact-checking may itself have been a sop to “ref-working”—on the part of Democrats—but speaking for myself, I have never wanted debate moderators to delve into the weeds of every contestable piece of rhetoric, but to quickly and clearly call out obvious and outrageous conspiracy theories. ABC showed last night that this can be done in a deft way; if only one candidate’s rhetoric met this standard, that’s the fault of that candidate, not ABC. The lowness of the bar here also demonstrated, more clearly than I’ve seen in a while, how obvious—how risible, and hollow—many Trump allies’ ref-working has become. It should never have been taken seriously. There is now absolutely no excuse for news organizations to do so.
In Monday’s newsletter—which was about criticisms of “sanewashing” in media coverage of Trump’s incoherent, fact-free diatribes, like the “news conference” in which he spoke about Bob Knight—I argued that the debate would offer viewers the chance to see Trump without a filter (at least to some extent), but that how the rest of the press characterized his rhetoric afterward would matter, too. As it happened, much of the subsequent coverage was sharp. There were also ample sports analogies (Chris Wallace on CNN: “Kamala Harris pitched a shutout”) and euphemisms. (When I looked this morning, the top headlines in two major outlets described Trump’s rhetoric or the debate itself as “fiery.”) The debate around this sort of coverage will surely continue. So, too, will the debate around debates and their moderation—even if it remains unclear whether we’ll see Harris and Trump do another this cycle—and, as I wrote on Monday, the extent to which the media should show news consumers Trump unfiltered; sans refs, as it were. (Interestingly, some observers, including Peters, felt that ABC did its viewers a service by letting Trump speak more than Harris last night. “The job of the moderators is to help the American people get a better, more informed look at the candidates,” Richard J. Tofel argued—something ABC achieved both in fact-checking Trump and letting him “drone on.”)
Coverage of the aftermath of the debate was also consumed by the verdict of one “ref,” in particular: the pop megastar Taylor Swift, who used the moment to formally endorse Harris. “Recently, I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site,” she wrote in a post on Instagram, next to a photo of her and her cat. “It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.”
Other notable stories:
- As noted above, Trump claimed during last night’s debate that immigrants are eating Americans’ pets. His remark was (at least so far) the apotheosis of a conspiracy theory that has gone viral online in recent days, holding, baselessly, that Haitian migrants in the Ohio city of Springfield have been abducting and eating cats and dogs; J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, was among those to share the lie, and last night he doubled down in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. (“I think that it’s important for journalists to actually get on the ground and uncover this stuff for themselves,” Vance said; Collins’s colleague, Jake Tapper, noted afterward that journalists are covering the story.) NPR’s Jasmine Garsd wrote after the debate that the claims fit into “a long history of accusing immigrants of eating cats and dogs.”
- Yesterday, the union representing tech staffers at the New York Times voted to authorize a strike in protest of stalled negotiations with management; it’s not clear when a strike might happen, Sara Fischer reports for Axios, but “with the elections coming up, any time in the near future would be problematic for the Times.” In other labor news, unionized staffers at Law360, a publication owned by the database company LexisNexis, went on strike this week after failing to reach agreement on a contract. (The union representing the staffers is challenging recent layoffs at the National Labor Relations Board.) And journalists at the Anchorage Daily News are planning to form a union; Alaska Public Media’s Casey Grove has more details.
- Also yesterday, a group of organizations in Los Angeles announced a $15 million investment in local news in the city, in partnership with the American Journalism Project. “The initiative will debut a nonprofit that will use this funding to support local newsrooms in the city in an effort to increase coverage on community issues,” Feven Merid reports for CJR. “The initiative comes at a difficult time for local news throughout California. The Medill School of Journalism reported that California has lost a third of its newspapers and that the number of journalists in the state has dropped by 68 percent since 2005.”
- In the UK, Paul Marshall—an investor in the right-wing network GB News, who also owns the news and commentary site UnHerd—completed a takeover of The Spectator, a conservative magazine once edited by Boris Johnson. As we reported last year, a fund fronted by Jeff Zucker, the former head of CNN, and backed by the government of the United Arab Emirates initially tried to acquire The Spectator but was forced to backtrack after lawmakers moved to block foreign ownership of British periodicals. The magazine is expected to be run independently of UnHerd.
- And last week, Kate Lamble—a BBC journalist who covered the long-running inquiry into the disaster at Grenfell Tower, a London residential block that burned down in 2017, killing seventy-two people—said that she had been laid off after the inquiry published its final report. Writing for The Guardian, Jane Martinson criticized the decision. “The tragedy was in large part about missed warnings and attention not being paid,” she writes. “Among the very many lessons to be learned, it seems that one—the importance of local and specialist journalism—has already been forgotten.”
ICYMI: Can Kamala Harris use the debate to keep her media momentum?
Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.