Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Debate commission says it will make changes to format
NEWYORK » The presidential debate commission said it will soon adopt changes to its format to avoid a repeat of the disjointed first meeting between President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden.
The Commission on Presidential Debates said Wednesday the debate “made clear that additional structure should be added to the format of the remaining debates to ensure amore orderly discussion of the issues.”
One possibility being discussed is to give the moderator the ability to cut off the microphone of one of the debate participants while his opponent is talking, according to a person familiar with the deliberations who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The next presidential debate is a town- hall format scheduled for Oct. 15 in Miami.
Moderator ChrisWallace struggled to gain control of Tuesday’s debate in Cleveland because of frequent interruptions, primarily by Trump. The candidates interrupted Wallace or their opponent 90 times in the 90- minute debate, 71 of them by Trump, according to an analysis by TheWashington Post.
Wallace, of Fox News, pleaded for a more orderly debate, at one point telling Trump, “The country would be better served if we allowed both people to speak with fewer interruptions. I’m appealing to you, sir, to do that.”
“Ask him, too,” Trump said.
“Well, frankly, you’ve been doing more interrupting than he has,” Wallace said.
Biden on Wednesday called the debate “a national embarrassment.”
Despite some suggestions that the final two presidential
encounters be canceled, both campaigns said they expected their candidate to attend.
Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said the commission was “only doing this because their guy got pummeled last night. President Trump was the dominant force and now Joe Biden is trying to work the refs.”
ABC News’ Martha Raddatz, whomoderated one of the three debates between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, said Wallace was put in a nearly impossible situation. Faced with the same behavior, she said, shemighthave called a stop to the debate for a moment to recalibrate.
She never had the option, technically, to cut off the microphone of a candidate four years ago, she said. It also wasn’t in the rules that were agreed to in advance by the candidates and commission.
“To say, ‘ He’s not going to follow the rules so we aren’t, either,’ it’s an unprecedented situation,” Raddatz said. “That was so out of control.”
Twitter was ablaze with criticism for Wallace early in the debate for losing control of the proceedings. That was illustrated by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough,
who tweeted, “What is Chris Wallace doing? He has no control over the debate. He asks a question and ( lets) Trump continue yelling. This is a disgrace.”
By the time he was on “Morning Joe” the next morning, Scarborough had cooled off. He called on the debate commission to act.
“While it was extraordinarily frustrating, I think all of us need to walk a mile in his shoes before saying the morning after, ‘ He could have done this, he could have done that,’” Scarborough said.
Some of the president’s supporters believed that Wallace was too hard on their candidate. Trumpsuggested he was also debating Wallace, “but that’s no surprise.”
Wallace got some criticism from opinion personalities on his own network. “Trump is debating the moderator and Biden,” prime- time host Laura Ingrahamtweeted during the debate.
Another Fox colleague, Geraldo Rivera, expressed more sympathy.
“The guy signed up to moderate a debate and he ended up trying to referee a knife fight,” he said.
Wallace, host of “Fox News Sunday,” was not immediately made available for comment by Fox.