OUR DEMOCRACY'S NEW CLOTHES: When the moderators challenged some lunatic claims...

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2024

...a powerful empire fought back: When Candidates Kennedy and Nixon debated, they did so at the dawn of the modern political era.

In real time, Theodore White had a complaint—a complaint about the new shape of the public discourse as this new era came into being.

As we noted yesterday, this was the general shape of White's complaint:

White thought that Kennedy's initial statement about Quemoy and Matsu "was probably one of the sharpest and clearest responses to any question of the [four] debates." But the candidate had only been given two-and-a-half minutes to state his view about this central issue of the day.

In White's assessment, two-and-a-half minutes only permitted that well-versed candidate the chance to offer "a snatch of naked thought and a spatter of raw facts." 

And then, things got even worse. 

One week later, on Columbus Day, Kennedy offered an "extraordinarily lucid half-hour speech on Quemoy and Matsu in New York." But when the candidate presented that speech, only three newspapers in the whole country published the full text of his lucid address!

Today, no newspaper would even dream of publishing some such text, not even in online editions. In White's assessment, the fact that only three newspapers had done so was a sign of how bad things had already become. 

In Tuesday's report, we posted the full text of Candidate Kennedy's statement in that second debate. It was only two-and-a-half minutes long, but it was crammed with detailed information and with references to the actions and the views of statesmen of the day.

In White's view, that statement by Kennedy in that debate barely scratched the surface of the candidate's relevant thinking and knowledge. Our question to you is this: 

Could Theodore White have imagined the day in which a major party nominee, in a televised presidential debate, would offered a statement like this as part of the two (2) minutes he had been allotted?

TRUMP (9/10/24):  ...We're a failing nation. And it happened three and a half years ago. And what, what's going on here, you're going to end up in World War III, just to go into another subject. 

What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country—and look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States! And a lot of towns don't want to talk—not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it. 

In Springfield, they're eating the dogs! The people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating—they're eating the pets of the people that live there! And this is what's happening in our country. And it's a shame.

...She's destroying this country. And if she becomes president, this country doesn't have a chance of success. Not only success. We'll end up being Venezuela on steroids.

The candidate had mainly (though not exclusively) been asked to state his view about an immigration bill he had allegedly helped to defeat. 

In his response, he had wandered the countryside, speaking about the size of crowds at political rallies. It's generally agreed that he was "baited" into doing that by Candidate Harris's previous statement.

Has Candidate Harris been paying people to attend her rallies? That strange claim by Candidate Trump, offered as part of this two-minute statement, went unaddressed by the moderators of the debate. 

His claim about the eating of cats and dogs produced a different reaction. 

As of last Tuesday night, this stupid but inflammatory claim had already been widely debunked. Despite that fact, he candidate angrily made it. 

Within that context, wisely or otherwise, moderator David Muir responded in the manner shown:

MUIR: I just want to clarify here. You bring up Springfield, Ohio. And ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.

An exchange with the candidate proceeded from there. Were cats and dogs being eaten in Springfield? 

"We'll find out," the candidate eventually said. Our question today is this:

Back at the dawn of the era, could Theodore White have imagined a presentation like that from a major party nominee during a presidential debate?

We're willing to guess that the answer is no. This leads to a second question:

In the face of that candidate's angry claims, did Nuir show good judgment by seeking to "clarify" the claim Trump had made about the cats and the dogs?

In our view, the answer is yes. Elsewhere, the answer was no. 

The pushback came the next day! From within the Murdoch Empire in the redoubts of Red America, an accusatory piece in the New York Post started off like this:

Trump was fact-checked by ABC moderators 5 times during debate—while Harris was left alone

Former President Donald Trump was fact-checked at least five times by moderators during his Tuesday presidential debate showdown against Vice President Kamala Harris—while the Democratic nominee was noticeably left alone.

ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis interjected and debunked the Republican nominee, 78, nearly a half-dozen times during the 90-minute debate in Philadelphia as Trump spoke about abortion, crime and immigration.

Meanwhile, Harris, 59, was allowed to speak uninterrupted—despite rattling off falsehoods about active US military in combat zones, as well as Trump’s stance on abortion, the right-wing Project 2025 blueprint and his “very fine people” remark about the Charlottesville race riot.  

Trump has since slammed both ABC and its moderators, arguing the debate was “rigged,” “unfair” and a “three on one” affair.

This lengthy piece appeared on September 11, the day after the debate. Trump had been "fact-checked at least five times," a pair of reporters said. 

(That amounted to "nearly a half-dozen times," the reporters further explained.)

For the record, how many times was this candidate "fact-checked?" For ourselves, we could set the number as low as three. It seems to us you have to stretch to get it up to five.

You can teach the number flat or round. In our view, two of the "fact-checks" were clumsily handled. 

In one instance, moderator Linsey Davis simply inserted an accurate statement about the illegality of killing babies after birth. Her abrupt statement, while accurate, wasn't obviously relevant to the various things Trump had said in his rambling statement, which included a heinous, apparently unfounded claim about Candidate Walz—a claim which went unchallenged.

In another instance, moderator David Muir tried to insert this "fact-check" in the aftermath of a wild set of apparent misstatements by Candidate Trump:

TRUMP: ...They allowed criminals. Many, many, millions of criminals. They allowed terrorists. They allowed common street criminals. They allowed people to come in, drug dealers, to come into our country, and they're now in the United States. And told by their countries like Venezuela, "Don't ever come back or we're going to kill you."

Do you know that crime in Venezuela and crime in countries all over the world is way down? You know why? Because they've taken their criminals off the street and they've given them to her to put into our country. And this will be one of the greatest mistakes in history for them to allow—and I think they probably did it because they think they're going to get votes. But it's not worth it. Because they're destroying the fabric of our country by what they've done. 

There's never been anything done like this at all. They've destroyed the fabric of our country. Millions of people let in. And all over the world, crime is down. All over the world except here. Crime here is up and through the roof. Despite their fraudulent statements that they made. Crime in this country is through the roof. And we have a new form of crime. It's called migrant crime. And it's happening at levels that nobody thought possible.

MUIR: President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country. 

There are obvious questions which might be asked about border policy in the past four years. It's widely agreed that this is a policy area which presents a serious challenge to Candidate Harris, fairly or otherwise.

That said:

Are crime rates really "way down...in countries all over the world?" Have governments in countries all over the world actually "taken their criminals off the street and given them to [Candidate Harris] to put into our country?"

On their face, those are the astoundingly serious claims. To appearances, those claims are also lunacy-adjacent. 

Before Tuesday night, had the candidate ever extended this familiar storyline to this extent? As far as we know, he had not. 

More commonly, this candidate has said that a few specific countries have been emptying their prisons and jails and sending such criminals into this country. As far as we know, he had never extended this claim to the point where countries all over the world are reducing their crime rates by dumping their criminals into this country, in concert with Candidate Harris.

As normally offered, this analysis hasn't exactly made sense. If the criminals in question were already in prisons and jails, how could exporting them reduce a nation's crime rate?

By Tuesday night, the criminals were being gathered "off the streets"—in nations all over the world! That said, the candidate's claims about crime rates all over the world are wholly unfounded. 

In the rational world of a Theodore White, they would have sounded a bit like the claims of a lunatic.

In a similar vein, is crime in this country really "through the roof?" We know of no reason to believe such a claim, but there is no perfectly reliable way to measure the occurrence of crime in this country. 

In this instance, it seems to us that Muir would have been on firmer ground if he'd simply asked the candidate to comment on the FBI data, rather than by presenting those data as a matter of established fact.

That said, the candidate's statement had been littered with apparently lunatic claims. The same was true of his angry claim about the eating of cats and dogs. It was also true of his remarkable claim that Candidate Walz has said it's OK to murder new-born children.

In that sense, Muir and Nelson faced a difficult challenge in their roles as moderators last Tuesday night. Arguably, they were confronted with "a task greater than that which rested upon General Washington!"

Could Theodore White have imagined the day when a presidential candidate would offer a statement like the last one posted—a statement about declining crime rates around the world, created by the rounding up of criminals for delivery into this country, in a televised White House debate?

We'll guess the answer is no. We'll make the same guess about the candidate's disordered claims about the eating of the cats and dogs of Springfield, Ohio.

Assigned to moderate that debate, Muir and Nelson faced an unprecedented challenge.  In our view, they could have performed their assignment more perfectly, but none of moderators in 1960 had to deal with claims as peculiar as those which came from this one candidate on this peculiar night.

For the record, the other candidate made statements that night which we would regard as inaccurate. As a matter of personal privilege, we wish she hadn't said this:

HARRIS (9/10/24): I was at the Capitol on January 6th. I was the Vice President-Elect. I was also an acting senator. I was there. And on that day, the president of the United States incited a violent mob to attack our nation's Capitol, to desecrate our nation's Capitol. 

On that day, 140 law enforcement officers were injured. And some died. And understand, the former president has been indicted and impeached for exactly that reason. 

But this is not an isolated situation. Let's remember Charlottesville, where there was a mob of people carrying tiki torches, spewing antisemitic hate. And what did the president then at the time say? "There were fine people on each side."

At best, we'd score the highlighted statement as substantially misleading or as insufficiently fair. Within our own demanding realm, we might even score it as simply inaccurate.

Even there, it's hard to say that Candidate Harris made the kinds of claims her opponent routinely made last Tuesday night—inflammatory claims which were baldly inaccurate, joined to other inflammatory claims for which the candidate has never offered any basis in fact.

In our view, Muir and Nelson could have done a more perfect job in their attempts at clarification. In our view, they also could have challenged other wild things Candidate Trump said that night.

In his gloomiest dreams at the start of this era, could Teddy White have imagined a candidate making a statement like the one this candidate made about the eating of pets?

We'll suppose the answer is no. But the New York Post leaped into action, and the tribunes at the Fox News Channel were soon reciting their corporation's talking point. 

Our democracy, such as it is, continued to spin downhill from there. Out of the hustings, Candidates Trump and Vance continue to declaim about the eating of cats and dogs. 

Our culture is draped in a new suit of clothes. Our general view on the matter is this:

Even as we speak today, it's proving hard for some of our nation's finer citizens to come to terms with that deeply challenging fact. 

Tomorrow: Is the New York Times refusing to see our society's new suit of clothes?