The obvious prejudice shown by debate moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis should surprise no one.
After Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice grossed $110 million for its opening weekend of haunted-house antics, the week’s biggest carnival-ride shock and exasperation came from conservative media observations about the Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debate. Conservatives are always surprised that mainstream media always display their bias.
David Muir and Linsey Davis, the ABC network moderators for last Tuesday’s presidential debate, are not journalists, but they play journalists on television. Who was unprepared for that?
The Muir-Davis deception was part of an ongoing media revolt against the electorate that has been boasted about in the trade press. But many refused to heed those reports as warnings.
A July headline in the Wrap gushed, “Kamala Harris Has an Unprecedented Hollywood Power Base — and It’s Already Gone to Work for Her.”
Sharon Knolle and the Wrap editor in chief Sharon Waxman collaborated on a “big read” investigation, detailing the film and television elites who announced their Democrat political affiliations and participation. It was the industry’s enthusiastic response to the Democratic Party’s choosing Harris as its presidential nominee. But Knolle and Waxman failed to mention the Democratic National Committee’s unethical skirting of traditional primary procedures, merely citing “the abrupt rise of her candidacy.”
The heart of The Wrap’s combination survey and think piece disclosed the longtime, entangled relationship between Harris and ABC-Disney Entertainment’s co-chair Dana Walden.
This normalization of partisanship has been apparent in the trade press at least since the political shift in cultural journalism during the Obama administration, a triumphant period for Hollywood liberalism.
Deep within the typical list of boldface celebrity names Beyoncé, George Clooney, J. J. Abrams, David Geffen, Casey Wasserman, Aaron Sorkin, Mindy Kaling, Octavia Spencer, the name Dana Walden slips in: “Harris also has a tight circle of powerful female friends in Hollywood that advise and support her, including Disney’s Walden, Amazon Studios chief Jen Salke and Sharon Klein, Disney’s head of TV casting.”
But more interesting is the description of Walden: “As the head of Disney’s television business, she runs ABC News.” This puts Walden in charge of the Muir-Davis moderator squad that notoriously interfered with the debate.
Yet the obvious prejudice shown by Muir-Davis is not news; it follows a practice of TV news-hires interloping since PBS’s Candy Crowley in 2012 and, in 2020, Chris Wallace, then at Fox.
There’s a long line of TV performers who brandish their political preferences under the façade of interviews, town halls, and panel discussions: NBC’s Savannah Guthrie and Kristin Welker; CBS’s Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan; everyone at MSNBC; everyone at CNN except Scott Jennings; ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Jonathan Karl, Rachel Scott, and Martha Raddatz, plus Muir and Davis.
Although Muir and Davis are lesser lights at ABC-Disney, their debate activism demonstrates the disingenuous methods of turning “news” into entertainment. It’s both a cynical and dishonest practice that, in this hyper-information era, feeds general naïveté about the political workings of the entertainment industry. Independent journalist Matt Taibbi recently noted, “Reporters no longer see themselves as a check on power. They see themselves as a part of it.” So Muir-Davis “fact-checked” Trump and repeatedly gave passes to Harris.
Taibbi’s insight is confirmed by Knolle and Waxman’s quote of an unidentified “Hollywood journalist” who claimed, “People aren’t necessarily thinking about this as a Democrat or Republican winning. It’s like good and evil.”
Such self-justifying hysteria determines industry performance as much as concern with job security does. That same unnamed source panicked, “It’s not about alienating fan bases this time. It’s like ‘If she doesn’t win, I won’t have a career or life to come back to because we will be dead.’”
It’s naïve to be shocked that TV personnel think and behave this way. Or to regard TV news and entertainment as separate professions. Media hawks at the Wrap or ABC-Disney who accept this partisanship are not much better than pundits crying out at “journalistic betrayal.” Both operate on the public’s false consciousness — their lack of sophistication as media naifs.
The misunderstanding that arises from the job titles “reporter,” “journalist,” “anchor desk,” “surrogate,” and “contributor” is part of the media industry’s own showbiz deception. Desk activists pose as journalists without ever actually pursuing the news. Here’s where Fake News and false consciousness intertwine. It works only when candidates accept it, when pundits and the naïve public go along with the thrill ride.