Tonight's inevitable debate blame game

And a fun new term: 'sane-washing'

-Wikipedia

The presidential campaign will enter a critical phase when the first (and likely only) debate between the two major-party nominees kicks off tonight in Philadelphia. The event is being produced by ABC. The coverage starts at 9 p.m. Eastern but, mercifully for me, it begins at 8 p.m. Texas time.

The network has agreed to share its live feed with many other media outlets. If you don’t have cable or a streaming service such as Hulu, you can stream it live on your computer or mobile device through the home page of abcnews.com, or on the YouTube channel of PBS (see display at the end of this column).

If history is any guide, tonight will be typical of any candidate forum featuring Donald Trump. His opponent is engaged in serious preparation as she pores over briefing papers, meets with key advisers and engages in role-playing. From what we know of Trump, via his old debate coach Chris Christie, the ex-president does minimal preparation, relying instead on the trust he has in his ability to cope and to put his opponent in her place with one-liners and assorted put-downs. You can expect, for example, that at some point during the debate Trump will call Kamala Harris a “nasty woman,” as he did to Hillary Clinton in 2016:

Harris will try to do better than she did in 2019 when, during her brief bid for the Democratic nomination, she stopped just short of calling her future boss Joe Biden a racist for his opposition to the forced busing of public school students in Delaware.

It appears that both sides are trying to lower expectations or blame someone else if something goes wrong. On the right, we have the usual complaints about bias in the mainstream media. ABC News has always been a rich target for conservatives.

Yesterday morning, NewsBusters, an arm of the right-wing Media Research Center, cited an MRC study that looked at all 100 ABC stories about the race that aired on World News Tonight since July 21, when Harris entered the race:

Our analysts found 25 clearly positive statements about Harris from reporters, anchors, voters or other non-partisan sources, with zero negative statements — none. That computes to a gravity-defying 100% positive spin score for the Vice President.

Count me a skeptic of this “study.” Is it possible that just about any survey of a national news organization will render similar results? After all, practically every time Trump opens his mouth, he goes on the attack and says something incendiary. And simply reporting it will sound “negative.”

Trump himself has been grumbling about ABC and its lack of fairness. Ironically, he made the comments to Sean Hannity of Fox News, the highly discredited network which settled a defamation suit last year from Dominion Voting Systems for more than three-quarters of a billion dollars:

ABC is the worst network in terms of fairness. They’re very nasty, and I think a lot of people are going to be watching to see how nasty and how unfair they are.

This is the “rigged election strategy” Trump has used so often: “If I lose, it will be because of cheating.” The blustering, addled 78-year-old is clearly concerned about being outshone by the telegenic 59-year-old.

I have yet to detect a similar strategy from the Harris campaign itself but her supporters are out in full force on social media, warning moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis that they had better fact check Trump at every turn. No, it should not be the job of the moderators to fact check the participants on the fly. They should ask questions and then get out of the way, as Jake Tapper and Dana Bash did back in June at the Biden-Trump debate, characterized by Puck’s John Heilemann as “The 90-Minute Human Car Crash That Changed (Almost) Everything About The 2024 Election.”

-Wikipedia

That Tapper-Bash strategy allows for more ground to be covered. Third-party fact-checking can be published afterward.

I have moderated candidate debates myself and follow the same playbook. I asked questions and let the candidates respond. If one made an assertion that wasn’t true, then the other candidates were free to set the record straight during rebuttal. I have also interviewed candidates for office one-on-one. In that case, if they said something that wasn’t true, then I would call them on it. But insisting that moderators fact-check the office-seekers during a debate is to suggest that journalists should do the candidates’ jobs for them. Moderators should get out of the way. It’s not about them and their egos.

The other phenomenon I’ve noticed of late is the tendency on the left to be hypercritical of media coverage. First, angry activists on Threads lashed out at fellow progressives who suggested Biden withdraw from the race after his disastrous debate performance in June. When they were proved wrong, they turned their sights on the news media, especially the New York Times, which was accused of being pro-Trump because he would be good for business. Tell that to conservatives …

The phenomenon has even birthed a funny new term: “sane-washing,” a portmanteau of “sane” and “whitewashing’ defined by the Urban Dictionary as “Attempting to downplay a person or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public.” Turns out it wasn’t as new as I thought. The Urban Dictionary entry was dated April 22, 2022.

The idea is that Trump’s lunatic pronouncements and senescent word salads are being sanitized by a compliant media, either to boost his candidacy or to satisfy the corporate overlords of otherwise liberal journalists.

So it appears that both sides are lowering expectations and if their candidate does poorly, we know whom is to blame. Break out the popcorn and crack open a cold drink at 9 p.m. Eastern. Below is the live feed from PBS, with pre-debate coverage starting at 6 p.m.