It appears that folks are potentially turned off by ABC’s “World News Tonight” anchor David Muir and his performance as one of the moderators for last week’s debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.
Muir and co-moderator Linsey Davis fact-checked Trump five times without ever correcting Vice President Kamala Harris, prompting a plethora of conservatives to suggest the debate wasn’t fair.
According to Fox News, even Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America called for a correction after Davis made an abortion claim during the debate during one of the fact-checks on Trump that the group said was “100% inaccurate.”
Now, it seems as if loyal Muir viewers are catching the news elsewhere after the debate.
According to the same Fox News report, Muir’s “World News Tonight” averaged 6.7 million viewers on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, the three episodes following the debate, after averaging 7.6 million in 2024 leading up to the debate.
Although Muir’s newscast remained the No. 1 broadcast evening newscast, the 12% dip in viewership is more significant than slight declines “CBS Evening News” and “NBC Nightly News” saw when comparing the three episodes following ABC’s debate to the year-to-date totals, according to the report.
After the debate, Trump labeled it as “one-sided” and believed Harris should have been fact-checked on a variety of claims.
“Every one of them should have been questioned by David Muir, who I’ve lost a lot of respect for. Everyone’s lost respect for him,” Trump said last week.
“It was so … one-sided,” he continued. “It was one against three.”
ABC’s Davis admitted in a post-debate interview that her fact-checking of Trump was influenced by the CNN debate that went disastrously for President Biden in June.
“People were concerned that statements were allowed to just hang and not [be] disputed by the candidate Biden, at the time, or the moderators,” Davis told the Los Angeles Times last week.