The impending Presidential debate on Thursday is colliding with a recurring rhetorical problem: the Presidential debate moderators. Since the inception of televised presidential debates in 1960 with the debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, the problem of debate moderators has been persistent. In the academic ideal of debate, moderators would exert no argumentative influence upon the debate. Moderators would, as the term implies, mitigate the partisan excesses potential to such an event. This is a profound concern since presidential campaigns are exerting some of the most powerful ideological convictions of the nation. Presently, concerns are raised by the Trump campaign and its supporters that Dana Bash and Jake Tapper will not be fair as the CNN moderators in this first Presidential debate of 2024. Those concerns have historical foundation both specifically and generally. Without correction of the problem of journalist moderators, the public will continue to escalate the sense of partisan frustration and grow increasingly impatient for the obvious solution of more dispassionate and fair debates.

In the 21st century, journalist debate moderators have exclusively occupied the presidential debate moderator position. Despite a proliferation of rules governing the debates, there are no rules governing the journalist moderators. This in the past 25 years leads to a growing domination of the journalist moderators. In 2020, Fox News journalist Chris Wallace surpassed the 25% of time speaking threshold. In the 20th century, moderators often spoke less than 10% of the time. The lengthy questions offered by journalists combined with excessively short answer times such as 90 seconds create a communication context ripe for misunderstanding and misstatements. This compression of candidate time and expansion of journalist speaking time is an important contributor to the volatile conduct of Biden and Trump in debate number one of 2020.

These problems take place against the publicly understood backdrop that journalists are perceived as taking sides with the Democratic Party, a perception recently demonstrated by CNN’s cutting off a Trump advisor on air who sought to criticize Jake Tapper’s history of attacks on President Trump. Public perceptions are not without empirical evidence for this concern. A 2022 survey of 1,600 journalists in the United States found that Republican Party affiliation among journalists is declining precipitously. Journalists who said they were Republicans dropped from 18 percent in 2002 and 7.1 percent in 2013 to 3.4 percent in 2022. Public affiliation with the Republican Party is 26%. From 2013 to 2022 the percentage of Democrat affiliated journalists has increased from 28 to 36%. Newsrooms increasingly lack the ideological diversity to understand or carry out effective moderator roles in these pivotal civic functions known as the presidential debates.

An important part of the Commission on Presidential Debates collapse as a forum for these events is the moderator problem. Steve Scully was suspended from C-SPAN for lying about his Twitter account being hacked as he prepared for the second presidential debate in 2020. Many conservative pundits wonder why President Trump is agreeing to debate in a forum so thoroughly controlled by CNN and moderators with a history of intense antagonism toward his Presidential leadership. Trump proved one year ago in his townhall event with CNN journalist Kaitlyn Collins that he can turn media hostility into a rallying point for his followers. Regardless of what the ideological outcome is of this antagonism, the current utility of moderators is low because they serve as a distraction to the ideal purposes of a debate: to directly compare competing ideas offered by candidates.

There are at least two straightforward solutions to the current problem. First, if there is no alternative acceptable to journalist moderation, two reciprocal journalists of opposing ideological histories should be selected to moderate. They would both have equal opportunities to provide questions. A second solution is to require as a moderation rule, that moderators serve severely limited functions of announcing a single word topic and then indicating when time starts and stop for each speaker. The second solution is ideal because it would allow the public to hear more arguments from the candidates and less arguments from the moderators. That is an ideal civic purpose. A free press is an intrinsically important civil right enshrined next to our civil right of free speech. The ideological captivity of journalism jeopardizes that vital civic practice. We need better presidential debates in order to have the best opportunity of healing America’s partisan divide. Debate is the educational tool that in its ideal and unhindered form can accomplish such an audacious goal.

Dr. Ben Voth is professor of rhetoric and director of debate and speech at Southern Methodist Unviersity in Dallas, Texas. He is editor of the American Forensics Association’s flagship journal for debate and speech coaches- Argumentation and Advocacy. He is also co-editor of the Lexington Book series focusing upon Political Communication. He is author of several academic books and book chapters about debate.

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