ABC News and its moderators, particularly David Muir, faced a great deal of backlash in the wake of the debate it hosted between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris on the night of Tuesday, September 10. Namely, the network and its moderators were accused of extreme anti-Trump bias in the debate.

Those who accused the network and the moderators of bias particularly pointed to the way Trump and Kamala were treated in terms of fact-checking. Trump was peppered with follow-up questions and fact-checks whenever he got a good point in or made a claim, whereas VP Harris was generally able to dodge questions or lie about Trump with no real push back.

At times, that bias bordered on the absurd. For example, co-moderator David Muir was, at one point, engaged in a testy back and forth with former President Trump over whether Trump had been sarcastic or not, with Muir attempting to “fact-check” Trump’s claim that he was being sarcastic. Meanwhile, Kamala pushed debunked hoaxes like the “very fine people” hoax and wasn’t fact-checked for it.

The idea that bias would be present during the debate shouldn’t have been hard to predict ahead of time, as co-moderator Linsey Davis had suggested, falsely, in August that Trump had ties to the Ku Klux Klan, and an analysis of coverage found that the other co-moderator, David Muir, gave Harris 99% positive coverage and Trump 93% negative coverage.

Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fletcher, commenting on the fact-checking situation and how it was a bias problem for the network. Fletcher said, in a post on X (formerly Twitter), “ABC is making a huge mistake trying to fact check this live. They’re only proving how biased they are. Harris fabricated an attack on Trump over IVF. ABC sat there and said nothing.”

Similarly, Glenn Greenwald, a liberal who is hardly overly friendly to former President Donald Trump, sounded off on David Muir’s apparent bias during the debate and said that Kamala was being covered for by the biased moderators. Greenwald said, “David Muir is criticizing and attacking Trump more than Kamala is. Kamala can relax because the ABC “moderators” are handling the debate for her.”

Also chiming in on the matter was Fox News Channel host and perpetual Jessica Tarlov antagonist Greg Gutfeld, who said that the moderators were obviously biased in favor of Kamala and that the network is a wreck. He wrote, “This debate is no longer about trump vs harris; it’s about moderators obediently picking a side. ABC is a s*** show.”

Another who joined in was Alex Pfieffer, a member of the Trump campaign, who called out another Kamala lie that wasn’t fact-checked by the ABC News moderators in the way that Trump’s comments were. He wrote, “Kamala shook her head and said “that’s not true” when President Trump highlighted her support for defunding the police. She lied and ABC didn’t call her out on it. Here is ABC’s story: Harris, in 2020, said ‘we have to redirect resources’ from police.”

Watch the clip Pfieffer was referencing here:

Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video