ABC News’ Linsey Davis, one of two moderators for last week’s presidential debate, admitted to the Los Angeles Times that the plan was only to fact-check former President Donald Trump, and not Vice President Kamala Harris.
As Breitbart News noted, Davis and co-moderator David Muir fact-checked Trump seven times — often incorrectly — while never fact-checking Harris once, even when she used hoaxes, such as the Charlottesville “very fine people” hoax.
Davis told the Times that ABC had deliberately targeted Trump — and only Trump — because of perceptions that he had been allowed to get away with false statements in the CNN debate against President Joe Biden in late June.
As the New York Post noted:
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Davis said she wanted to address concerns that Trump’s statements could be allowed to “hang” there unchallenged by his opponent or the moderators, as they were when Trump and Biden debate on CNN in June.
“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,” the Times 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,” Davis told the outlet on Wednesday morning.
Davis admitted that the moderators studied past statements — “Politicians tend to say the same things again and again” — but somehow did not prepare to check Harris’s repeated use of hoaxes. (Harris used the “very fine people” hoax in 2020 during the vice presidential debate with Mike Pence, who fact-checked her onstage at the time.)
Biden also used the “fine people hoax” and other lies in the June debate, and CNN did not fact-check him, either.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.