By Jan van Groesen

It is called ’the big lie’ in America that former President Donald Trump has been stubbornly claiming for almost four years now that it was not Joe Biden but he himself who won the 2020 presidential election. Many see Trump as the man with whose image this big lie has since been identified, all the more so since the overwhelming evidence of his mendacity has been documented and meticulously recorded by the mainstream media in the US. The media’s fact-checkers have their hands full almost daily.

So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone that Trump was going to make full use of the recent CNN TV debate with Joe Biden for his characteristic mendacity. And it was completely incomprehensible that the hosts of CNN, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, made the airtime allotted to the former president available to him in full, uninterrupted, unhindered and uncorrected for what he said. After all, the impact of such a broadcast is immeasurable in all corners of the world.

No doubt the reverberations of the debate would have been quite different from the commotion that took shape immediately after the broadcast. There were calls from many quarters that Biden should immediately free up his candidacy for the presidential elections in November for another candidate of the Democratic party. This call was expressed with quite a bit of penetrating language from the perception that Donald Trump should be considered the glorious winner of the debate. It is now a well-known phenomenon that thinking in terms of winners and losers has taken off in today’s America, but it is going too far to declare the winner of the person who answers almost all questions in the debate with blatant lies, fabrications and conspiracytheories . In this way, a duel is not decided.

Pitiless

Indeed, Joe Biden made a weak impression during the TV debate. Here stood a man who constantly made an unreal impression, stumbling over his choice of words, sometimes no longer knowing what he wanted to say, muttering more to himself than aimed at the viewing public. The fact that this was mercilessly registered was a reflection of reality.

But professional journalism has the responsible task of informing the public, the citizen, about what is happening in terms of socially relevant developments in society and not to serve as a propaganda channel for those who have the biggest mouths.  This is all the more true of presenters of news programmes broadcast through the powerful medium of television. During the CNN debate, Joe Biden, despite his weak performance, always gave substantive answers to the questions he was asked. There was nothing wrong with that. Donald Trump, on the other hand, gratefully used the 90 minutes of airtime not to answer most questions, but to ride his hobbyhorse of “the most dangerous place in the world”, being the border of the US with Mexico along which many refugees and asylum seekers want to reach America and for which Biden is responsible. Furthermore, Trump was given plenty of room to make his well-known unsubstantiated accusations about Biden’s criminal behavior and to repeatedly rub his conspiracytheories into the American public. 

TV format

Jake Tapper and Dana Bash cannot hide behind the format that was agreed upon in advance with the two presidential candidates for the propaganda free pass they provided to Trump. Nor can they refer to CNN’s fact-checkers who announced a few hours after the debate that 90 percent of Trump’s answers were based in part or entirely on lies. After all, the damage had been done. The impact that such a TV broadcast makes on millions of Americans and millions elsewhere in the world is then established and cannot be undone later with the actual facts. CNN knows that too.  But the euphoria among the CNN leadership about bringing in this first TV debate between the two ruffs may have had a somewhat blinding effect on the risk that they could become part of Donald Trump’s manipulative behavior.

Even in the printed American news media, the role of the CNN presenters was pointed out on the day of the debate. The broad sentiment “there was no pushback” against Trump’s mendacity in the debate was emphatically expressed: “and he was given, free rein to just lie as much as he wanted”.

The leader of the Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, told reporters a day after the debate: “It’s hard for me to get past the fact that Donald Trump lied at the beginning, lied in the middle, lied at the end and lied throughout the entirety of the debate to the American people.” And Nancy Pelosi, former leader of the Democrats in the House, also vented her frustration. ” Again, integrity versus dishonesty,” she said. “How come the press doesn’t hold [Trump] to his lies? That’s what I don’t understand. One lie after another.”

Roe vs Wade

Take Roe v. Wade, the U.S. regulation whose Supreme Court, dominated by conservatives, ruled two years ago that the constitutional right to abortion, which had been in place for nearly half a century, was overturned and largely remanded back to the states of America. Donald Trump said in the CNN debate that Roe versus Wade (of which Biden is a great advocate) led to unborn children of 8 months and even small babies being murdered thanks to Joe Biden. And on the chaos at the border with Mexico, he emphasized that Biden is responsible for the entry into the U.S. of “criminals and people from mental institutions abroad” who come to cities like New York to kill our people. And no one corrected him during the debate on these and many other unsubstantiated accusations he made against his political opponent.

In Atlanta, where CNN is headquartered, people knew all too well that this TV debate between Biden and Trump would be watched by millions in America. And that many millions more in the world would tune in to this TV channel to get a picture of the election campaign in the US, a democracy that is still admired by many even though it has already degenerated considerably under the influence of Trump. The question would have been justified as to the extent to which ostentatiously lying politicians should have  been  given a platform at all to radiate their manipulative behavior to many millions of viewers.

Critical and impartial

Of course, formats such as TV interviews or TV debates do not lend themselves easily to journalistic intervention. The interviewee and the debate must also be able to do justice because they can also contain essential information for the citizen. But at least the interviewers and the presenters have to make sure that the viewers, the listeners and the readers are not fed lies. If that is the case, they must immediately inform the public. Only then will there be critical, impartial and independent journalism that makes an important contribution to the preservation of democracy. CNN has done a very bad turn here.

Jan van Groesen

1-7-2024