ABC News Debate Moderator Linsey Davis Admits Fact-Checking Was Planned Solely For Trump

Following the second presidential debate between 45th President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris last week, political commentators began to speculate that the ABC News moderators were deliberately biased against Trump after failing to fact-check Harris on multiple occasions while choosing to fact-check Trump seven times. Moderator Linsey Davis confirmed those suspicions during a recent interview with The Los Angeles Times that they were purposefully targeting Trump.

"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 said about Trump's remarks, adding that she intended to fact-check Trump on abortion. "That was an obvious thing to get on the record."

Davis and co-moderator David Muir reportedly worked on their questions for weeks and examined the various past statements of the candidates before the Philadelphia debate. "Politicians tend to say the same things again and again," she explained. Despite her insistence that the duo looked into both Trump and Harris' policy records for weeks before the debate, their unwillingness to fact-check the Democratic presidential candidate shows potential bias, particularly since Harris repeated debunked claims like Trump calling white supremacists "fine people" following the 2017 Charlottesville riot.

The lopsided behavior of the moderators in favor of Harris during the debate led former Bill and Hillary Clinton advisor Mark Penn to demand an investigation into the ABC News team. "I actually think they should do a full internal investigation, hire an outside law firm. I don't know how much of this was planned in advance," Penn said about the moderator's biased fact-checking. "I don't know what they told the Harris campaign. I think the day after, suspicion here is really quite high, and I think a review of all their internal texts and emails really should be done by an independent party to find out to what extent they were planning on, in effect, you know, fact-checking just one candidate and in effect, rigging the outcome of this debate. I think the situation demands nothing less than that."

Conservative commentators, such as Megyn Kelly, have argued that higher-ups pressured the ABC News moderators to show favoritism towards Harris, particularly since the head of ABC News, Dana Walden, is close friends with the vice president. "I'm ashamed of those moderators at ABC News. They did exactly what their bosses wanted them to do. The person who runs ABC News is a close personal friend of Kamala Harris, that is responsible for Kamala Harris and her husband meeting," Kelly said. "They did Dana Walden's bidding tonight. It was three against one on that debate stage."

"It was a mistake to trust ABC News with this debate," she continued. "Those two moderators tried to sink Donald Trump tonight. They're trying to steal this election. They're openly working to sink him. It was so bad … Their bias against him and toward her, it's going to backfire." Following the debate, the Trump campaign echoed the same message, characterizing the event as a 3-on-1 contest with the moderators repeatedly asking unfavorable questions of Trump and refusing to fact-check Harris.

You can follow Sterling on X/Twitter here.