Tag: David Muir

Trump’s threat to ABC shows that Nixon’s still the one; plus, media notes

It all goes back to Nixon. 1972 photo (cc) by Charles Harrity of The Associated Press.

Something that Donald Trump said after his disastrous debate with Kamala Harris served to confirm my Richard Nixon Unified Field Theory of Everything.

The morning after the debate, Trump called in to Fox News, and he was mighty unhappy. He began complaining about ABC News and its debate moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, who had the temerity to correct him when he said that undocumented immigrants are feasting on pets fricassee and that Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, support “executing” infants after they are born. Then he issued a threat:

I think ABC took a big hit last night. I mean, to be honest, they’re a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that.

Now, ABC is a network, and it doesn’t hold a license. But it does own stations in some of the largest media markets in the country, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. (The ABC affiliate in Boston, WCVB-TV Channel 5, is owned by the Hearst chain.) So even though no one can take away a non-existent license from the ABC network, a fact that Trump may or may not understand, he could threaten local licenses.

Which brings me to Nixon. After he won re-election in 1972, his presidency started to unravel over the Watergate scandal — and coverage of that scandal was being driven by The Washington Post. One of Nixon’s responses was to threaten (not in so many words, mind you) to pull the licenses from several television stations that the Post then owned. For instance, a close friend of Nixon’s, Cromwell Anderson, headed up a group that challenged the Post’s license at a Miami TV station. Then-publisher Katharine Graham wrote in her memoir (free link), “Personal History”:

Anderson began to move against our station in Miami in September of 1972. This happened to be the same month Nixon (as later heard on the tapes) said that The Post would have “damnable, damnable problems” about our license renewals, a phrase that was censored when the tapes were first released by the White House….

[T]he legal costs of defending the licenses added up to well over a million dollars in the 2½ years the entire process took — a far larger sum then than now for a small company like ours.

Back then, presidents and former presidents didn’t blurt out such threats on national television. They worked behind the scenes, and Graham couldn’t be sure if Nixon had a direct role in the license challenges or not. Then as now, though, allowing the government to have a say in regulating the media can lead to threats and retaliation — something that Nixon took advantage of, and that Trump would like to emulate.

Media notes

• My Northeastern journalism colleague John Wihbey and I spoke with Patrick Daly of Northeastern Global News about why some media outlets in the U.K. are charging readers an extra fee if they don’t want to be tracked by advertising cookies. I told Daly that the practice hasn’t caught on in the U.S. because most people don’t care all that much about privacy. Daly, by the way, is based in Global News’ London office, where Northeastern has a campus.

• The once-great Baltimore Sun has fired reporter Madeleine O’Neill for comments she made on the Sun’s internal Slack channel about the paper’s newish owner, Sinclair Broadcast Group chair David Smith. Among other things, the op-ed page has been running pieces by Smith’s buddies without disclosing that Smith has been funding the causes they’re pushing. Fern Shen of the Baltimore Brew has the story.

Kamala Harris may have turned in the best performance in the history of national TV debates

After Tuesday night’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, I was trying to think of a better performance than Harris’.

The proper superlative was hard to come by. Joe Biden humiliated Paul Ryan in the 2012 vice presidential debate but was no better than good enough against Trump in 2020. Barack Obama, for all his rhetorical gifts, was only a so-so debater. Ronald Reagan may have won the 1980 election when he turned to President Jimmy Carter and said, “There you go again,” but Reagan was hardly a master of thrust-and-parry. I have not gone back and watched the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960, but historians have said that people who listened on the radio actually thought Richard Nixon won.

So yes, it’s possible that Harris’ overwhelmingly dominant performance was the best in the history of televised national debates. What was so impressive was that she did not do particularly well in the 2019 Democratic primary debates, though she smoked Mike Pence a year later. And before you say, well, Trump helped Harris by melting down, a lot of that had to do with her.

Trump’s not easy to debate — just ask Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. His firehose of lies makes it difficult to find a point of entry. Harris did it by getting under his skin early on and making him lose his cool. Her body language was superb. She made sure to mention that he’s been found liable for sexual assault and faces sentencing in an unrelated criminal case. In retrospect, it’s a good thing that Harris lost her bid to keep both mics on throughout, since forcing Trump to stay (relatively) quiet allowed her to build her case.

My former Northeastern colleague Alan Schroeder, a leading historian of presidential debates, put it this way on Twitter/X:

The worst possible version of Trump showed up for this debate tonight. Harris had him on the defensive from the opening handshake, and that’s where he stayed for the rest of the night. This is as clear-cut a win as I’ve seen in a presidential debate.

Here I’ll note that a few non-MAGA pundits were less than impressed with Harris. “For those voters looking for answers on policy, the debate is unlikely to have left them feeling better informed,” wrote New York Times opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury. Boston Globe political analyst James Pindell actually gave Harris a “C” and Trump a “C-minus,” saying, “Within the context of this campaign, this was a missed opportunity for Harris. She didn’t truly stand out.” I honestly don’t know what to say except: Good Lord, what were they watching?

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The right is freaking out over the ABC News debate moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, for having the temerity to call out a few of Trump’s more egregious lies. But though you can make the case that fact-checking should be on the candidates, the moderators shouldn’t sit there liked potted plants, either. It shouldn’t have been left solely to Harris to highlight Trump’s grotesque lies about non-existent abortion laws that allow just-born babies to be “executed” and fake memes claiming that undocumented immigrants are eating dogs and cats. Oliver Darcy put it this way in his media newsletter:

While it was not feasible for Muir and Davis to correct every lie that streamed from Trump’s mouth, the duo admirably worked to ensure that on issues of major importance, the debate was not reduced to a he-said, she-said. Instead, ABC News made certain that the debate was tethered to reality and that brazen mis-and-disinformation was not given a free haven to infect the public discourse.

The questions for the most part were very good, too, getting into real substance about Trump’s unfitness to lead — especially his racism and his role in the failed coup of Jan. 6, 2021.

Then again, Trump continually turned questions that should have been helpful to him against himself, especially regarding the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan that took place under President Biden’s watch. I mean, who is “Abdul,” anyway?

And to top it off, Taylor Swift endorsed Harris after the debate ended, signing off her Instagram post as “Childless Cat Lady.”

The Washington Post checked in with 25 uncommitted swing-state voters after the debate; 23 said Harris performed better and only two thought Trump did. There’s also this remarkable finding from CNN’s flash poll of registered voters who watched the debate:

Debate watchers said, 63% to 37%, that Harris turned in a better performance onstage in Philadelphia. Prior to the debate, the same voters were evenly split on which candidate would perform more strongly, with 50% saying Harris would do so and 50% that Trump would. And afterward, 96% of Harris supporters who tuned in said that their chosen candidate had done a better job, while a smaller 69% majority of Trump’s supporters credited him with having a better night.

Two and a half months ago, President Biden turned in what might have been the worst debate performance in history, raising questions about his age and stamina and ultimately forcing him out of the race — and overshadowing Trump’s own miserable lie-infested performance. Last night we saw exactly the opposite.

Will it matter? Probably not. The race remains unimaginably tight. But for 90 minutes, Kamala Harris made the best possible case for herself and Donald Trump made the worst. That has to count for something.