Media pundits, commentators praise debate moderators, hit Trump for complaining of bias
Left-leaning media pundits and commentators praised the debate moderators on Wednesday and called out former President Trump for complaining of bias.
Liberals praised the ABC News presidential debate moderators, Linsey Davis and David Muir, after the debate and called out former President Trump for his criticism of the moderators, suggesting that it meant he lost the debate.
"If you're showing up in the spin room, you've lost. If you're blaming the moderators, you've lost," Politico's Jonathan Lemire said Wednesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris debated on Tuesday night, and the vice president was widely considered to be the winner. Trump entered the spin room after the debate and spoke to reporters, telling several that he believed he had a great night.
Both moderators fact-checked Trump multiple times during the debate and failed to fact-check Harris at all.
Pundits took aim at former President Trump's reaction to the debate on Wednesday, and praised the debate moderators. (Lloyd Bishop/NBC via Getty Images | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images | Jared Siskin/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images | Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Haddad Media)
NBC News' Dasha Burns said Wednesday that Trump's immediate reaction to the debate was telling.
"The former president going to the spin room, which, traditionally in politics, you don’t do unless you feel like you didn't well enough in the debate. He's now saying, after claiming he’s willing to do another debate, now saying maybe not so much. And he and his team have spent a lot of the day and a lot of last night going after the moderators, going after the network, rather than talking about their candidate’s performance, which I think is pretty telling," she told MSNBC's José Díaz-Balart.
CNN's Abby Phillip praised the fact-checking by Muir and Davis.
Former CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said Davis and Muir did an "excellent job."
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Former Biden-Harris campaign adviser Alencia Johnson told CNN's Jim Acosta on Wednesday, "The reality is that Vice President Harris looked presidential last night and the moderators did a great job fact-checking Donald Trump."
Puck News' Dylan Byers said ABC did an "incredibly commendable job."
CNN's Bakari Sellers said Trump was so "humiliated" by Harris in the debate that he resorted to blaming the moderators.
Justin Baragona, a media columnist at former MSNBC host Medhi Hasan's news site, Zeteo, said Democrats were similarly blaming the CNN moderators after the Biden-Trump debate in July.
"If you're whining about the refs, you are losing," he wrote on social media.
Former CNN host Don Lemon also posted a video on social media on Wednesday and said, "let's hear some love for the moderators."
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Fox News contributor Marie Harf passed along on "Outnumbered" that a conservative writer admitted to her, "If we're complaining about the refs, we're losing."
Other conservative commentators, including CNN's Scott Jennings, agreed that blaming the moderators was not a good sign for the former president.
"You can’t complain about the refs when you aren’t making your own jump shots. And for Trump, it is no excuse for his getting sidetracked (at least until his closing statement) and failing to make the central case that must be made: If you want change, you can’t leave the same people in charge," he wrote in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times.
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MSNBC's Brian Lowry wrote in a column on Wednesday that Davis and Muir did a better job than CNN's Jake Tapper and Dana Bash did during the first debate between Biden and Trump.
"The tightrope walk of modern journalism means never pleasing everyone, and the constant peril of being accused of putting a thumb on the scales. So we have to give credit to ABC News’ David Muir and Linsey Davis, who for the most part were able to deftly navigate that fine line during Tuesday’s debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Particularly notable was the duo’s real-time fact-checking of Trump, who has earned his reputation for a casual relationship with the truth," Lowry wrote.
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