In what was an absolutely wild admission to the Los Angeles Times about her behavior during the September 10 presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris that was hosted by ABC News, ABC News anchor Linsey Davis admitted that her fact-checking of Trump was influenced by how the CNN debate between Trump and Biden went.
As background, both Davis and her co-moderator, ABC News personality David Muir, were hammered in the aftermath of the debate over what critics contended was their bias in seemingly only fact-checking former President Donald Trump and letting Vice President Harris get away with spreading obviously false claims, such as the “fine people” hoax.
Despite that criticism, Davis said during an interview with the Los Angeles Times that she wanted to use her position as a debate moderator to address concerns that the former president’s statements could be allowed to “hang” in the air unchallenged by the moderators, as she claimed happened when he debated Biden on CNN in June in what even most critics of CNN contended was a relatively fair debate.The Times, describing Davis and what she said, wrote:
“Davis, wearing pink glasses while speaking to The Times over breakfast at the Ritz Carlton in Philadelphia, said the decision to attempt to correct the candidates was in response to the June 27 CNN debate between Trump and President Biden, whose poor performance led to his exit from the race.“
According to the Los Angeles Times, Davis said, on Wednesday, the 11th of September, that people had been concerned about Trump’s statements not being disputed during the CNN debate. She said, it reported, “People were concerned that statements were allowed to just hang and not [be] disputed by the candidate Biden, at the time, or the moderators.”
Wildly, the Los Angeles Times added that the co-moderators were ready to counter both candidates’ “most egregious statements, contending, “With co-moderator David Muir, Davis had studied hours of campaign rallies and interviews to prepare for the much-anticipated event at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center, and were ready to counter the candidates’ most egregious statements.”
However, as critics have noted, Kamala wasn’t fact-checked even when she made “egregious statements” that any normal, unbiased fact-checker would have been able to catch and call out, such as the “fine people” lie. Davis reportedly countered those accusations by saying that she and Muir were unable to catch every misstatement.
Watch the examples of in-debate alleged bias, namely the discriminate fact-checking, here:
Davis added that “anonymous” accounts remind her of the “stereotype” that she “can’t be unbiased,” saying, “There is a stereotype that I am acutely aware of that I can’t be unbiased covering this moment. And the anonymous Instagram people serve as reminders every day.” However, she didn’t add why she was unable to combat even the worst instances of Kamala’s outright lying, such as the “fine people” hoax, if she was so unbiased and it is a mere lie and stereotype that she couldn’t be and wasn’t unbiased during the contentious debate.
Featured image credit: By Rhododendrites – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=149806750