Biden Trump presidential debate Sept. 29, 2020
Get rid of split-screens. They are entertaining, but distracting.
Tuesday’s debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden was an embarrassing disgrace.
Plagued by dozens of interruptions and false or misleading statements — mostly, but not all, from President Trump — the first face-to-face meeting of the major party candidates seeking to be leader of the free world was called a “shitshow” on CNN, “the worst presidential debate” on ABC, a “train wreck” on NBC, and “raucous” by the Wall Street Journal.
While most voters have already made up their minds — indeed, some have already cast their ballots — presidential debates serve as opportunities for undecided voters to gather more information about candidates, children to be introduced to the political process, and partisans to be energized to support their standard bearer.
Debates should give us a chance to see how candidates perform under pressure, find out what they know, hear their vision for the country, and evaluate their highest priorities. Last night, voters could not be blamed for learning none of those things.
Many people have pointed their fingers, aimed their tweets, and directed their memes at moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News. It is fair to criticize Wallace for framing some of his questions as though there was a pure, objective symmetry between the behaviors exhibited by the candidates and even the proposals they laid before the American people. But much of what happened was beyond Wallace’s control.
The most important determinant of what happened last night was related to the president’s willingness to abandon the agreed-upon rules and regularly interrupt Biden when Biden had the floor, harangue Wallace about his questions, and make claims that were false.
Fortunately, we can alter the structure of debates so that this kind of debacle is less likely during the remaining debates in 2020.
Indeed, the presidential debate commission is already exploring changes for next month’s debates. Here are some suggestions for them to consider in order to mitigate the worst of the problems from Tuesday.
First, the moderator must control the candidates’ microphones.
When candidates are not up to speak, their microphones should be off. This would go a long way toward solving the biggest problem from the first debate — constant interruptions that made it nearly impossible for the candidate who had the floor to complete a thought.
Second, no split-screens. They are entertaining, but they are distracting. Research from the Social Media and Democracy research group in my department has found that people tend to react more to the body language of candidates than the words they say in debates. It is important to read the body language of the person speaking, but watching the other person only serves to distract us from potentially important information about a candidate’s ideas, governing style, and temperament.
Good TV does not necessarily make for a good democratic republic.
Third, empower moderators to follow-up if their question is not answered. A downside of this approach is that candidates could strategically avoid a question, knowing they could get more time with a follow-up. One way to deal with that perverse incentive would be to empower the moderator to cut the amount of time the candidate got to speak in the next segment and/or cut the time allotted to them in their closing statement.
Fourth, fact-check the candidates. This would probably require adding a commercial break so that fact-checkers could conference with the moderator to discuss whether a false or misleading statement made by a candidate warranted a public correction during the debate. The specter of a live fact-check might reduce candidates’ incentives to boast, exaggerate or lie.
Of course, research examining political communication shows that politicians being checked will almost certainly cry “media bias.” What’s more, the candidate’s supporters are likely to interpret a fact-check claiming that their candidate said something that was not true through partisan-colored glasses, minimizing the effect of the fact-check.
Even so, there is journalistic and civic value to the reporting of the verifiable truth, even if politicians and their followers complain about it. That said, there is a danger of making an error in a fact-check, so moderators should tread with caution here.
Finally, explain the rules clearly at the beginning so we can know who is violating them.
Some things, of course, will remain beyond moderator control. No one can make the president disavow white supremacists or require his challenger to refrain from calling the president a clown. But a moderator can point out the asymmetry evident in those decisions and ask the candidates to explain themselves to the American people without interruption for two minutes.
The people who seek to represent us owe us an honest, fair debate.
Michael W. Wagner is a professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he directs the forthcoming Center for Communication and Civic Renewal.
