The Presidential Debates Have Become A Hot Mess

There have historically been controversies with debate moderators or with the way the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) operates, but there has never been a year like 2020. Taking the candidates out of the equation, let’s look at the presidential debate controversies over the past month, along with examining the one that is still unfolding.

The final Trump-Biden debate is set to take place this Thursday, on Oct. 22.

Candidates: President Donald J. Trump and Former Vice President Joe R. Biden
Date: Thursday, October 22, 2020
Time: 9 pm ET (8 pm CT, 7 pm MT, 6 pm PT)
Channel: ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and more!
Location: Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee
Moderator: Kristen Welker, NBC News
Debate Topics: Fighting COVID-19, American Families, Race in America, Climate Change, National Security, Leadership

The CPD announced a rule change for Thursday’s debate where each candidate’s microphone will be muted during the first-two minutes of answering a question, according to NPR:

Under the new rules, President Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden will each have two minutes of uninterrupted time to speak at the beginning of every 15-minute segment of the debate.

“The only candidate whose microphone will be open during these two-minute periods is the candidate who has the floor under the rules,” the commission announced. After that, there will be time for discussion with both candidates’ microphones open.

Many viewers may welcome the change given that the first debate was hard to listen to and even harder to understand with so much cross-talk and interruption, mostly from President Trump and moderator Chris Wallace.

The topics for the third debate have also been announced, but the Trump campaign is taking issue with the list noting that the third debate on the presidential debate schedule has typically been focused on foreign policy:

President Donald Trump’s campaign accused the Commission on Presidential Debates of shifting the focus of Thursday’s debate away from foreign policy in an effort to “insulate” former Vice President Joe Biden “from his own history.”

When the campaign agreed to the debate, Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, said they were told it would be focused on foreign policy, yet only a few of the recently announced topics “even touch on” the subject. Stepien criticized the topics for being yet another action from the debate commission to showcase its penchant for helping Biden, who he said was “desperate to avoid conversations about his own foreign policy record.

It’s true, at the third debate of the 2012 election, foreign policy was the focus. However, the third debate in 2016 veered slightly toward a mix of mostly domestic topics but specifically included a segment on foreign policy called “Foreign hot spots.” Candidates didn’t always stick to the topics, but the effort was made to have a robust foreign policy discussion.

Why then, has the CPD and moderator Kristen Welker changed the routine for Thursday’s debate to be a focus primarily on domestic issues? That part is unclear, but the CPD said Welker is solely in charge of the topic list.

Add this question to the long list of questions that have been raised about the way the 2020 presidential debates have unfolded.

Moderator Controversies

For starters, there rarely seems to be consensus over a good slate of moderators. Chris Wallace, of Fox News, moderated the first debate on Sept. 29 and said his job was to be “invisible” during the process. By all accounts, he became very visible within minutes of the debate starting and often became engaged in arguments with President Trump. Is that the job of the moderator? To argue with candidates? The answer to that question likely comes from your own personal partisan leanings and it depends on who is doing the arguing.

Back in 2012, debate moderator Candy Crowley famously stepped into the exchange between Mitt Romney and President Obama over the topic of Benghazi. Crowley appeared to “fact-check” Romney during the debate, but later admitted she should have stayed out of it and that Romney, by and large, was ultimately correct. Too late, the damage was done, and the moderator became part of the story.

Steve Scully’s Twitter

The second debate, which was set for Oct. 15, was to be held in Florida as a “town hall” style debate with Steve Scully of C-SPAN set to moderate. Due to the President’s Covid-19 diagnosis, the CPD decided to make the event virtual with candidates participating remotely, which resulted in the President pulling out of the debate.

However, aside from the debate being canceled, there was the issue of possible moderator bias and misconduct.

Just days before the debate was to take place, a public tweet was sent from Steve Scully’s Twitter account asking a question to former Trump associate Anthony Scaramucci. “@Scaramucci should I respond to trump,” Scully wrote Oct. 8 in response to the president dubbing him a “Never Trumper.” The message was clearly meant to be sent in private.

As a result, Scully immediately said his Twitter account had been hacked, and that the CPD and FBI would be investigating. A few days went by without much news on this front until eventually it was reported that Scully lied about the hacking, and he would be suspended from his position at C-SPAN:

C-SPAN political editor Steve Scully has been placed on indefinite “administrative leave” after he admitted to lying about his Twitter feed being hacked, the cable network announced Thursday.

Scully – who was slated to host the second presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden, before it was canceled – claimed he was hacked after a tweet on his official account asked Trump critic Anthony Scaramucci how to respond to criticism.

After the tweet sparked backlash the following morning over its clear bias, Scully claimed his Twitter account had been hacked. C-SPAN and the Commission on Presidential Debates backed Scully’s claims.

Perhaps the most shocking part of the story is that Scully was reading the President’s tweets and felt the need to potentially respond days ahead of a debate where the moderator needed to remain a neutral body.

The Twitter kerfuffle was not the only issue with Scully. Years back, Scully had actually been an intern for Joe Biden in 1978, and continued to have a relationship with the Biden family, according to reports.

A more recent picture of Scully and Biden together also began making the rounds on social media ahead of the canceled Oct. 15 debate:

https://twitter.com/KelemenCari/status/1316837384596709376

In the end, the CPD was saved from the disaster of Steve Scully thanks to the President deciding to skip the second debate. However, it’s possible that Scully may have ended up backing out of the moderator role due to the dishonest way in which he handled his Twitter exchange with Scaramucci.

Kristen Welker’s Twitter

Now, with the final Trump-Biden debate of 2020 upon us this Thursday, there is another moderator controversy brewing, also involving Twitter.

As Mediaite reports, the moderator of the third debate, Kristen Welker, of NBC News, deactivated her Twitter account days after the Steve Scully controversy started breaking:

NBC News White House Correspondent Kristen Welker raised eyebrows after she deleted her Twitter account just weeks before being scheduled to moderate the final 2020 presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

Welker deleted her account following controversy over the tweets of fellow presidential debate moderator, C-SPAN senior executive producer Steve Scully.

“Welker deactivated her own account and was not asked to by the Commission on Presidential Debates,” a source with NBC told Fox News.

Attempting to access Welker’s account @KWelkerNBC now returns Twitter users with a notice saying, “This account doesn’t exist.”

The question, of course, is why? Why would a longtime Washington journalist, well-respected among her peers, turn off one of her major social media pipelines days ahead of her debut as a presidential debate moderator? We haven’t been provided a real good explanation other than that Welker took it upon herself to deactivate it, she was not asked to do so by the CPD, as far as we know.

Other reporting, however, opens questions about Welker’s objectivity as a reporter. According to records, Welker had been a registered Democrat up until at least 2012, and Welker’s family has a history of donations exclusively to Democratic candidates including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama:

Welker comes from an established Democratic family — who have poured cash into party coffers, and to Trump opponents, for years.

Her mother, Julie Welker, a prominent real estate broker in Philadelphia, and father, Harvey Welker, a consulting engineer, have donated tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic candidates and close to $20,000 to Barack Obama alone.

There was also $3,300 for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign and $2,100 for Hillary Clinton’s doomed 2016 presidential effort against Trump. Another $7,300 was contributed to the Democratic National Committee between 2004 and 2020.

In 2012, Welker and her family celebrated Christmas at the White House with the Obamas.

The infamous Welker photo with the Obamas at the White House Chrismas party has also been making the rounds on social media as more evidence, say Trump backers, of moderator bias:

https://twitter.com/SVNewsAlerts/status/1318045001784459264

Welker is not responsible for what her family does or who they donate money to, lots of children take different paths than their parents. However, following the controversy of Steve Scully, Welker’s relationship with the Obamas and family history of Democratic donations are getting more scrutiny.

To add to the story, Welker was caught on a hot mic revealing questions she was about to ask a Hillary Clinton spokesperson during an interviewer following a Clinton-Sanders debate in 2016:

It’s live TV, and mistakes happen. However, many Sanders supporters took the ordeal as more evidence that the media was ultimately backing Hillary, and that Bernie Sanders wasn’t getting a fair shake.

Selecting a moderator that is free from all human bias is impossible since no person is perfect in their career or their personal life. It does seem, however, that the CPD could and should have done a better job finding moderators who do not have the appearance of bias that can be found with two minutes of searching their Twitter archives or Google.

When issues like this do arise, where moderators do have possible conflicts of issue, it simply gives credence to President Trump’s claims of moderator or debate commission bias whether you agree with the claims or not.

There are literally thousands of journalists that work in national news organizations that do not have any ties to any politician. They do their job as journalists, asking questions, and informing the public. They do not spend time at White House Christmas parties, for any President, and they did not intern for one of the candidates on the debate stage, a clear conflict of interest whether acknowledged or not.

Chris Wallace might have fit that bill, and Wallace was chosen based on his performance in the final Clinton-Trump debate of 2016, which was largely praised. However, it could also be argued that Wallace had too much of a history with the President to be seriously considered for a moderator slot. The CPD would have known that announcing Wallace would immediately elicit claims of bias from the Trump campaign. Furthermore, Wallace just moderated a debate four years ago which has historically disqualified journalists from moderating again in the next cycle.

It may be time to consider an alternative to the model of finding a single person to act as a debate moderator. The CPD can handle things like venue selection and the logistics of the debate, they’re very good at that. However, they seem to be lacking when it comes to vetting a moderator or relying so heavily on the single moderator model. Perhaps it’s time for a panel of moderators or an entirely new format altogether.

It may be time to reform the CPD and decentralize the process of formulating the makeup and moderator selection for what amounts to America’s biggest job interview for Commander-in-Chief.