No audience, microphones cut to avoid invective: the CNN channel, which is hosting the first presidential debate on Thursday between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, wants to avoid the chaos of the previous duel of 2020, for this unmissable meeting with a difficult impact to predict.
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Invectives, taunts, and an outgoing president, Donald Trump, constantly interrupting his interlocutor Joe Biden who ends up saying “are you going to shut up, man?”: CNN hopes to avoid the cacophony which had dominated the first televised duel of the previous presidential. First of all, the debate will take place without an audience, in the channel’s studios in Atlanta, from 9 p.m. (1 a.m. GMT Friday). Above all, Joe Biden’s microphone will be cut off when Donald Trump speaks and vice versa.
The two oldest candidates in American history – 81 years old for Biden, 78 years old for Trump – will stand behind a lectern for 90 minutes.
CNN assures that the two moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, figures on the channel, “will use all the tools at their disposal to enforce speaking times and ensure a civilized debate.”
Joe Biden won a coin toss allowing him to choose which side he would stand on the stage or whether he wanted to speak first or second during closing statements. The outgoing president decided to stand on the right on the screen, leaving the choice to Donald Trump to intervene last and close the debate.
CNN has not indicated what topics will be covered and does not plan to do real-time fact-checking.
“One of the problems of a debate with Donald Trump”, who repeats for example without proof that the 2020 election was stolen from him, “is that the moderators cannot check the facts in real time and it “It’s better not to do it, it would be very risky and it would disrupt the debate,” underlines Kathleen Hall Jamieson, professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania. “The danger is that instead of informing, a debate could multiply inaccurate information,” she adds.
Joe Biden and Donald Trump will not have teleprompters or small prepared index cards, but will be provided with something to take notes. They will not be able to speak with their teams during the two commercial breaks.
Both candidates turned their backs on the Commission on Presidential Debates, an independent body, to rely on the CNN news channel. In consideration of public service, the Warner Bros. group channel. Discovery nevertheless authorized its rivals to broadcast the debate simultaneously, with a CNN logo and without external comments.
This means that Fox News regulars will be able to stay tuned to conservatives’ favorite channel. Fox News plans to go on air two hours before the debate, with its editorialists Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity, who regularly attack CNN, deemed “anti-Trump” by its supporters.
The second has already described Jake Tapper as a “radical left activist who hides behind the mask of a journalist”.
An essential, but not necessarily decisive, event in any American presidential campaign, the debate is massively followed: 84 million viewers for the first duel between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, a record, 73 million for the first Biden-Trump debate in 2020.
But this is the first time such a debate has been held so early, more than four months before the election and even before the candidates have been officially nominated by their parties. “The risk is that the American public won’t pay much attention to current events in the summer,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson.
“Typically, presidential debates do not affect a sufficient number of votes to decide the outcome of an election. But when an election is close, as it may be this time, they can play an important role,” she adds.
A second debate is planned on ABC on September 10, two months before the election.
