CNN laments giving Trump ‘guardrails’ in first debate by muting mics

The first and quite possibly only debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t come without some agony from the media.

(Video Credit: CNN)

Both camps debated the rules, with Harris’s team objecting to the mics being muted when candidates were not answering questions. While this was the rule during Trump’s debate with President Joe Biden, CNN realized that they may or may not have inadvertently helped the former president.

Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, who moderated the past debate, engaged in some Monday-morning quarterbacking ahead of the Trump-Harris debate.

“So, they have been really litigating this idea of microphones being muted for several weeks,” Tapper explained. “It is, those are the rules that Trump and Biden had agreed to, and Harris was trying to get them to change it. They did not change it. The mics are going to be muted if it’s not your turn to speak. Does – does that help one side or the other? Obviously, Harris didn’t want them muted.”

“Well, I believe that both the Trump campaign and the Harris campaign say flatly that they think it helps Donald Trump. And they’re saying that because of the lesson from our debate on June 27,” Bash lamented. “And of course, at the time, this was a new rule and it was done at the, initially at the request of the Biden campaign because they didn’t want Donald Trump to be interrupting Joe Biden all the time. And it turned out that after that debate was over, it was pretty clear that those muted mics gave Donald Trump guardrails. And he couldn’t interrupt and he knew that he couldn’t interrupt, which is why the Harris campaign tried really hard to change that.”

But why did it help Harris? According to Abby Phillip, it did not allow Harris to “create a moment” with Trump. She also claimed that it prevents the other candidate from being able to fact-check their opponent in real-time. Of course, Harris had no trouble with this as the ABC News debate moderators were more than happy to carry her water, never bothering to refute her many lies.

Abby Phillip worries that muted mics will hamper VP Kamala Harris’s ability to “create a moment” that makes Trump look bad.
She huffs that because of CNN’s mic rules, Biden was “unable to stop” Trump’s lies. pic.twitter.com/SXSdnUNMYS

— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) September 10, 2024

CNN conducted its own attempt at fact-checking, which accused Trump of lying 33 or more times whereas they could only find a measly one lie from Harris.

I thought this was a joke when I first saw it.

CNN only caught one Harris lie.

HOW IS THIS REAL??????????????????????? pic.twitter.com/OsdbTcbbyE

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) September 11, 2024

DONATE TO BIZPAC REVIEW

Please help us! If you are fed up with letting radical big tech execs, phony fact-checkers, tyrannical liberals and a lying mainstream media have unprecedented power over your news please consider making a donation to BPR to help us fight them. Now is the time. Truth has never been more critical!