The US Commission on Presidential Debates on Wednesday said that it would adopt changes to its format to avoid a repeat of the disjointed first meeting between US President Donald Trump and former US vice president Joe Biden.
The commission said that the first debate “made clear that additional structure should be added to the format of the remaining debates to ensure a more orderly discussion of the issues.”
One possibility being discussed is to give the moderator the ability to cut off the microphone of one of the debate participants while his opponent is talking, said a person familiar with the deliberations, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
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The next presidential debate is a town hall format scheduled for Oct. 15 in Miami.
Meanwhile, Nielsen said that 73.1 million people watched the debate on television, where it was shown on 16 networks.
That was more than any other television event since the NFL Super Bowl.
Photo: AFP
Moderator Chris Wallace struggled to gain control of Tuesday’s debate in Cleveland because of frequent interruptions.
The candidates interrupted Wallace or their opponent 90 times in the 90-minute debate, 71 of them by Trump, according to an analysis by the Washington Post.
Wallace pleaded for a more orderly debate, at one point looking at Trump and saying: “The country would be better served if we allowed both people to speak with fewer interruptions. I’m appealing to you, sir, to do that.”
“Ask him, too,” Trump said.
“Well, frankly, you’ve been doing more interrupting than he has,” Wallace said.
Biden on Wednesday called the debate “a national embarrassment.”
However, despite some suggestions that the final two presidential encounters be canceled, both campaigns said they expected their candidate to attend.
Tim Murtaugh, the communications director for the Trump campaign, said that the commission was “only doing this because their guy got pummeled last night. President Trump was the dominant force and now Joe Biden is trying to work the refs.”
ABC News’ Martha Raddatz, who moderated one of the three debates in 2016, said that Wallace was put in nearly an impossible situation.
Faced with the same behavior, she said she might have called a full stop to the debate for a moment to recalibrate.
She never had the option, technically, to cut off the microphone of a candidate four years ago, she said. It also was not in the rules that were agreed to in advance by the candidates and commission.
Twitter was ablaze with criticism for Wallace early in the debate for losing control of the proceedings.
That was illustrated by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who posted: “What is Chris Wallace doing? He has no control over the debate. He asks a question and let’s Trump continue yelling. This is a disgrace.”
By the time he was on Morning Joe on Wednesday, Scarborough had cooled off. He called on the commission to act.
“While it was extraordinarily frustrating, I think all of us need to walk a mile in his shoes before saying the morning after: ‘He could have done this, he could have done that,’” Scarborough said.
Steve Scully from C-SPAN is to moderate the Miami debate, a town hall format where people ask questions, which might make interruptions more difficult.
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