On Tuesday, Sept. 10, former President Donald Trump and current Vice President Kamala Harris took to the big stage to debate which candidate would better lead the nation for the next four years. Predictably, discussion surrounding opposing policy spiraled into personal attacks and blatant misinformation, some of which was met with live fact checking by ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis.
The live fact checking of the recent debate came in contrast to CNN moderators choosing not to live fact check the June 2024 presidential debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, instead opting to publish an online fact check of the debate after its conclusion.
During September’s debate, moderators’ fact checked Trump on several occasions. They corrected his blatantly false assertions about immigrants stealing and eating pets in Ohio, about Democrats being in favor of killing babies after birth and his continued lie about the 2020 election being “stolen.” Alternatively, ABC moderators did not fact check Harris once during the debate. This outraged conservatives, who quickly took to social media to voice their anger over the moderators being “biased.”
Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, went so far as to say the media was showing blatant favoritism to the Democratic party.
“This goes beyond bias – it’s a media company effectively joining the Harris campaign,” he posted on X. It’s true that moderators did miss an opportunity to fact check Harris on her claim that no United States troops are currently in combat zones. This sole falsehood stated by Harris went uncorrected until after the debate’s conclusion.
The outrage over the media’s supposed bias ignores the massive discrepancy in falsehoods stated by Harris and Trump. In the fact check of the debate, CNN found that former President Trump lied over 30 times, while Vice President Harris lied just once. Given this, it should be no surprise moderators corrected one candidate more than the other: it’s fitting. ABC’s broadcast was perceived as being left leaning even though the broadcast accurately reflected the disparity in truth communicated by each candidate. This highlights a larger issue plaguing journalism right now.
As bias is an incredibly important issue in today’s media landscape, journalists sometimes neglect their duty to be objective in order to appear impartial.
The responsibility to tell both sides of a story disappears when one of the sides is objectively wrong. When one politician in a debate, political party or side of a political issue is spewing blatant misinformation, it’s the role of a journalist to objectively report the truth. Failing to do so, out of fear of not appearing impartial, is doing a disservice to the public.
For example, with climate change issues, we’re in today’s situation because of flawed coverage. Regardless of any individual opinions on how to tackle climate change and energy and transportation policies, there is a clear and objective truth in the fact that the climate is changing due to emissions from human activity. Climate change is real, but looking back to the coverage of this issue in the 1990s and 2000s, when most Americans first became privy to the importance of the climate issue, there is a clear discrepancy in how attempting to appear balanced distorted the truth.
Shown in a 2004 study published by Science Direct, most news articles by prestigious American newspapers released from 1988 to 2002 gave as much attention to the minority of climate deniers as they did to the majority scientific view. For years, the denial of this objective truth by our politicians was framed by the media as a difference of opinion rather than a denial of facts. This gave a platform to the lie that climate change is not real, and thus contributed to a widespread apathy surrounding climate change in a shocking number of Americans.
The utopian idea that journalists float above political issues with wings of impartiality is unrealistic. In reality, many of the issues journalists report on do not have equal sides that should be given equal attention and treated with equal validity. Efforts from journalists to remain completely unbiased, although admirable, can be harmful. Polluting the news cycle with misinformation to tell both sides of a story can give a platform to dangerous rhetoric and ideas. Maintaining an educated democracy takes objectivity, not neutrality from our journalists. Journalists should feel secure in their responsibility to report the truth, even when it seems to take one side of a partisan divide.
