Presidential debates must be rescued from TV news media

Watching a U.S. presidential debate to gain political insight is like trying to quench your thirst by drinking tequila. You’re left even more dehydrated, and suddenly you’re drunk, too.

Instead of substantive discussion enlightening America, we are offered an entertainment spectacle. Presidential debates have officially become a corporate television news media product. The electorate accordingly lost a valuable opportunity to see a proper exchange on the merits between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. 

But the poor quality of the debate was not entirely the fault of the candidates. The root of the problem is that the debate was designed to maximize viewership rather than understanding. In that vein, the debate format featured two television anchors operating as activist moderators by interjecting opinions in the form of imbalanced, loaded “fact checks.”

Presidential debate moderators should not even be television anchors anymore. Television anchors are not policy experts. They are not economists, historians or political theorists. They are barely journalists. They primarily are entertainers.

Presidential debate moderators should instead be substantive and intellectually diverse. They should also have experience engaging in formal debate themselves, and TV-slot interviews do not count. 

The moderators for U.S. presidential debates should sit on panels comprising esteemed public intellectuals. The panels should be politically balanced, including academics spanning from the likes of Danielle Allen, Yascha Mounk and Scott Galloway, to those of Niall Ferguson, Glenn Loury and Victor Davis Hanson. They could feature prominent writers like David French, Malcolm Gladwell or Anne Applebaum. Panels filled with moderators like these would offer a diversity and depth of framing that would revolutionize the quality of the debates. 

Imagine Harris and Trump responding to nuanced hypotheticals and sophisticated prompts instead of predictable leading questions. We would have debates that reached deeper than surface level.

Imagine each candidate also getting chances for extended rebuttals and replies to those rebuttals. Even with a substantive, diverse panel of moderators, the candidates and their answers should remain the primary substance of the debate. Instead of fact checks and interspersed opinions from the moderators, candidates should be afforded extensive opportunities for back-and-forth exchanges on each given issue.

Moreover, we need formal and reasonable criteria for selecting the presidential candidates that may participate in the debates. Independent candidates who receive support from a large enough portion of voters should not be excluded, as Robert Kennedy Jr. was this year before suspending his campaign. The debates likely were Kennedy’s only opportunities to engage the other candidates and reach a national audience. But the Biden-Harris campaign offered to only debate Trump outside of the jurisdiction of the independent Commission on Presidential Debates.

One of the conditions of the Biden-Harris debate offer, in addition to entirely bypassing the debate commission, was that Trump would be the only other candidate participating. Trump accepted the untraditional offer, and the Biden-Harris campaign was accordingly able to preclude the presidential debate audience from seeing a strongly-polling independent third candidate. 

Recall that the Harris-Trump debate was only the second presidential debate in the first election cycle since 1988 in which the Commision on Presidential Debates did not officiate. Instead, for each general election debate so far this year, it has been CNN and ABC respectively officiating.

And these networks are enjoying the ratings. The viewership of presidential debates has become enormous, with 67 million Americans having tuned in to the ABC debate on television alone. That is 13 percent more viewers than the historical average. Ironically, the hyper-capitalization of presidential debates emerged from corporate media’s realization in 2015 that Trump’s debating style and the polarized reactions to it would attract more viewers. The first debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016 still holds the all-time record in viewership with 84 million. 

The huge viewership would be meaningful if the presidential debates were substantive. But the debates have simply become a TV special.

Granted, the candidates had their parts to play in the debate’s deficits. If last week’s presidential debate was just a TV show, the stars disappointed. Trump offered discursive hyperbole and came off as bitter and vindictive. He tried to hammer particular issues and emphasize that Harris is the incumbent in a scandalous and unpopular administration, but he barely articulated an argument in favor of any policy. 

Harris offered hollow platitudes and came off as self-righteous and condescending. Harris was much better prepared stylistically, but she did not seize the opportunity to even try to make a case for the policy record of the Biden-Harris administration. Given the debate format, she did not have to. 

Both candidates consistently offered misleading, unsubstantiated claims, whether it was Harris claiming that Trump supports a federal abortion ban or Trump saying that some Democratic states have legalized infanticide. Neither Harris nor Trump met their respective burdens to present a presidential vision better than the other’s.

But the mutually insufficient performances of the candidates must be seen in the context of the candidates having been constrained within the debate’s entertainment-based format. 

Looking forward to the Walz-Vance vice presidential debate to be hosted next month by CBS, despite being set to feature very different candidates than Harris and Trump, it is unlikely to be much different from this last presidential debate. 

Instead, expect more activist moderators delivering a stream of “gotchas,” after which Democrats will think the Democrat won, Republicans will think the Republican won, and independents will want their time back.

Jeremy Etelson was a Democratic staffer in Maryland. He received a J.D. from George Washington University in 2024 and an M.Phil. in political theory and intellectual history from the University of Cambridge in 2019.