ABC News Presidential Debate: TV was the winner
Thoughts on TV News, journalism, and digital media. Issue#11
Welcome to my latest Substack newsletter. I’m a former TV news journalist, turned digital and media executive. In this edition, how ABC News handled the US Presidential debate, the extraordinary new William and Kate video, and tributes to a legendary ‘old school’ ITN Chief News Editor.
The Split Screen Debate
Whatever else is being said about this week’s US Presidential Debate, it was definitely great TV. I watched it all, gripped as it moved from one area of bad-tempered disagreement to another. It covered the key issues in the election in a combative but highly watchable 90 minutes of television.
Yet again, old-fashioned, mainstream, linear TV was playing a crucial and centre-stage role - and the debate was watched by many millions of people in the US and around the world.
As the programme opened, ABC News raised the stakes, saying it was an historic event that could be “the most consequential moment of the campaign”.
There’s been a lot of discussion about who ‘won’ the debate. I’ll leave that to others to comment on, but how did ABC News handle the programme?
I’ve written before that moderating a TV debate between a country’s most senior leaders must be one of the most difficult jobs in the business. Yet the ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis were very much in control of the event - and, in my view, they asked sensible and measured questions.
The two moderators also managed to enforce most of the rules of the debate smoothly - far more than I thought they would be able to. In fact, it felt more controlled than some previous debates, and probably more so than this year’s UK election debates, some of which were criticised for candidates talking over each other or for time constraints, which prevented enough discussion of the issues.
The Rules
The rules for the debate were announced by ABC News last week. No audience. Muted microphones when the other person was speaking. No notes. Two minutes to answer each question with a two-minute rebuttal, and an additional minute for a follow-up. Only the moderators could ask questions. Two-minute closing statements.
I think this format worked. The rules did their job. The debate had its moments of anger and rudeness, but there weren’t unruly or out-of-control interruptions or candidates not having enough time to make their points.
There were a few occasions when Trump was allowed to make a point after his allotted time. This meant that, according to MSNBC monitoring, Trump spoke for 43 minutes and 3 seconds, to Harris’s 37 minutes, 41 seconds.
But as Tom Jones from Poynter wrote:
“In the end, it’s hard to say that anything the moderators did tipped the balance of fairness. Aside from a few lapses allowing Trump to speak out of turn, they kept the debate moving, hit pertinent topics, and the result was that viewers got an accurate sense of where the candidates stand at this moment.”
A strong feature of the production was the decision to use a split screen rather than a multi-camera studio format. It allowed the candidates to engage directly with viewers - Kamala Harris was particularly good at looking straight into the camera at the audience. Interestingly, it also allowed viewers to watch the reaction of the candidates as the other person spoke.
Donald Trump looked serious or sometimes angry when Kamala Harris was speaking. Whereas she often had a wry smile or quizzical look as he spoke. The split screen format meant that facial reactions played a key part in the programme.
Fact-Checking
The main dispute since the debate has, of course, been around the issue of fact-checking. As we know, on the night, ABC’s Muir and Davis fact-checked Trump on four occasions in real-time during the debate - including challenging the statement that immigrants have been eating pets in Ohio.
For many observers, this was an improvement on the CNN debate earlier in the year, which avoided calling Trump out on inaccuracies. The Washington Post had a headline saying it was “The night the debate moderators pushed back”.
But the fact-checking clearly riled Trump. After the debate, he was highly critical of the ABC News presenters and the ABC News network. His ‘THREE ON ONE!” social media message was typically unequivocal, as was his statement that ABC News should lose their broadcasting license for the way they handled the programme. Many right-wing commentators agreed with him.
ABC News
So, how did ABC News do?
I think, in general, the programme was professionally produced, and the format worked well. Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had more than enough time to put forward their arguments and refute what the other person had said. The split screen was a particularly effective way of capturing the mood of the night. The moderators stayed in control, and the debate ran more-or-less in line with the pre-agreed rules.
As for the fact-checking, it’s so difficult to get that right. What do you check and not check? It’s a pity they only fact-checked Donald Trump, and didn’t, for example, push back when Kamala Harris avoided answering a particular question.
But at the end of the day, and falling back on first principles, I would argue that non-partisan TV news organisations have a duty to present truthful and accurate coverage - whether it’s in a news bulletin, a one-on-one news interview, or, yes, an election debate. And that means, in my view, however difficult it is or imperfect, ABC News were right to do their best to challenge what they regarded as inaccurate statements.
So, not quite full marks for ABC News - but they did a professional and responsible job in the production of a programme that was always going to have a difficult task striking the right balance in such a polarised and bitterly fought election.
The William and Kate Video
The other major media story this week, besides the US TV debate, was the video issued by Prince William and his wife Kate, the Princess of Wales.
Rather than the usual, three-line, bland statement on a royal website, the couple instead issued a three-minute video to provide an update on Kate’s cancer treatment.
And what a video! Filmed in Norfolk, on the east coast of England, it was stylistically filmed and edited, ground-breaking for a royal message in its tone and intimacy, and with an emotionally charged commentary from Kate.
The BBC’s Royal correspondent Sean Coughlan said it was “Norfolk meets Hollywood plus Instagram”. But mostly it was just so strikingly different from any media communication that the British royal family has done before.
The ITV News Royal Correspondent Chris Ship summarised it well:
“It’s a remarkable departure from ordinary royal communications. Slick, highly produced, cinematic, slow-mo’d, soft focus, even the hand running through the wildflower meadows. For William and Kate, it allowed them to control the narrative.”
There’s a long history in the UK of the royal family experimenting with different ways of communicating through the media. The Queen allowed cameras to film her family as far back as 1968, but then banned the programme from being re-broadcast. There were disasters, such as the ‘It’s a Royal Knockout’ programme in 1987 or the Prince Andrew Newsnight interview in 2019, and controversy, such as Prince Charles’s interview with Jonathan Dimbleby in 1994.
There have been concerns that this latest experiment, too, has its risks. Some commentators said it was too choreographed and over-sentimental. Too schmaltzy and make-believe. Too personal and revealing for a future King.
But I have a different worry. The problem is that the editing style was so stylised that it’s difficult to repeat. It could soon become a cliché if the same style was used in future videos.
Kate and William have introduced a radically new informal, intimate style of video communication. It’s been well received this time, but it could go badly wrong if clumsily or insensitively repeated or copied in the future.
Revolving Doors in US Media
For those interested in US media ins and outs, media reporter Oliver Darcy left his high-profile job at CNN over the summer, where he edited the widely read CNN Reliable Sources newsletter to launch his own independent media newsletter, Status.
In an interview with Claire Atkinson in The Media Mix, he explained why he was doing it:
"Not to be clichéd, but we are all on this planet for a finite amount of time. And I did not want to stumble through life without ever having placed a bet on myself and taken a chance to build something of my own.”
Meanwhile, Brian Stelter has returned to CNN to replace Darcy, and has this week brought back a new-style daily Reliable Sources mail-out. He sent out the news via, of course, a newsletter email:
“Hello again, it's Brian Stelter — yes, really. I am thrilled to share that I am returning as the lead author of CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter, the digest I founded in 2015.
But this is not going to be a ‘Back to the Future’ remake. The media industry has matured, CNN has evolved, and I have changed a lot since I signed off two years ago... Time for new levels, new challenges.”
I assume that Oliver Darcy was hoping that Reliable Sources would have quietly withered away and left the market clear for his new project Status, and indeed, some thought that the old CNN media newsletter didn’t fit in with Mark Thompson’s emerging consumer-facing digital strategy.
But, as it turns out, and to misquote another American writer, the death of Reliable Sources “was greatly exaggerated”.
A News Supremo in a Different Era of TV News
And finally, some lovely tributes were written over the summer about former ITN and APTN boss Nigel Hancock - who died, aged 78, in July.
I worked with Nigel during his time at ITN, and he was very supportive when I started programme editing. We then got in touch again a few years ago via email. We commiserated with each other on being called Nigel, and had some great exchanges recalling the ups and downs of working in the TV news business.
Nigel had worked his way up to be Chief News Editor, and was a major figure in ITN in the late 1970s, 80s and early 90s. He very much reflected the swashbuckling, entrepreneurial streak in ITN in those years. Stubbornly loyal to his reporters and news editors, passionate about beating the BBC, and steeped in the old journalistic world of long lunches, job interviews held in the pub, and a ‘spend first, ask questions later’ approach to newsgathering.
He was certainly old-school, but ITN benefited enormously, in my view, from his ambition and competitive approach.
Nigel left ITN in 1993, and went on to set up the global news video agency APTV, which became APTN in 1998, and rebranded as AP Television News in 2005.
The Director of the BBC World Service and Deputy CEO of BBC News, Jonathan Munro, wrote: “Nigel’s competitive edge and lateral thinking were behind many an editorial win. He brought guile and cunning into journalism, and I, for one, loved that.”
The big stories in his time at ITN were events like the first Gulf War and the Bosnian War, but my favourite story in the tributes was by the former ITN and CNN correspondent Brent Sadler, who recalled how, in 1985, Nigel had sent him and a camera team to the tiny, but disputed, island called Rockall. Brent described it as a “classic Hancock scoop”.
Brent wrote:
“One defining story of the Hancock era revolved around Rockall, a remote granite islet in the North Atlantic. A former British special forces soldier wanted to live on its peak to settle a territorial dispute between the UK and Ireland. Ascents of Rockall were as rare as lunar landings, but Hancock wanted the story. Like astronauts in training, cameraman Sebastian Rich, soundman Richard Rose, and I met the challenge after going through an intense climbing course in Scotland.”
The news editor who worked on the story, Peter Wallace, still has a piece of rock that Brent managed to chip off and bring back to the ITN newsroom in London. Here’s Peter’s photo of the memento:
In another tribute, a former Editor of APTV (another Nigel, Nigel Baker) remembered a great quote from his former boss:
“After work, over one of his favoured ‘reasonable’ gins and tonic, Nigel spelt out his advice for motivating journalists. “Ask the impossible”, he said, “and get the exceptional”.
I’m not sure it’s a mantra that’s followed in today’s more caring newsroom cultures. But it undeniably produced results ‘back in the day’.
The tributes were written for the ITN 1955 Club Newsletter magazine. The magazine is for staff who used to work at ITN. For non-British readers, ITN is the main commercial TV news organisation in the UK, producing ITV News, Channel 4 News and Five News.
Ah, memories of ITN days in Wells Street come flooding back! A lovely tribute.