Stephen Battaglio | Los Angeles Times (TNS)
ABC News gets the spotlight Tuesday when its anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis moderate the first, and probably only, 2024 presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
The event will be held at Constitution Hall in Philadelphia without an audience starting at 6 p.m. Pacific. While ABC News is producing the debate, it will be available across all of the major broadcast and cable news channels and on streaming platforms including ABC News Live, Hulu, Disney + and YouTube.
Muir, 50, is the longtime anchor and managing editor of “ABC World News Tonight,” the most-watched network evening newscast. Davis, 46, is a 17-year veteran of ABC and is the anchor of “ABC World News Sunday.” She also helms “ABC News Live Prime,” a nightly program on the network’s streaming channel ABC News Now.
Trump has complained that ABC News is biased against him. He is suing the news division and “Good Morning America” co-anchor George Stephanopoulos over their reporting on the civil trial that found the 2024 Republican nominee liable for sexual abuse.
But viewers have seen nothing from Muir or Davis that would identify their personal political leanings. (Trump agreed to the ABC debate before President Biden dropped out of the race).
Davis, who fills 90 minutes a night on ABC News Now, regularly books interviews with members of Congress from both sides of the aisle. Muir was the first network anchor to interview Trump at the White House in 2016 and sat down with him again in 2020, one of the few TV news anchors outside of conservative media to do so. He was also the first to interview the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020.
Muir and Davis were co-moderators at ABC’s two Democratic presidential primary debates during the 2020 campaign.
Their performance Tuesday night will surely be the subject of much scrutiny.
The first 2024 general election debate, held June 27 when Trump was still running against Biden, turned out to be one of the most consequential in U.S. history. Biden’s halting performance caused such consternation among Democrats he decided to drop out of the race and endorse Harris.
The June showdown was watched by 51.3 million viewers according to Nielsen, down from 73 million viewers for the first faceoff in 2020. The event on Tuesday is expected to perform far better, with summer vacations over and Democrats’ enthusiasm over Harris emergence as an alternative to Trump.
Here’s what else you should know about the moderators:
Muir was a 13-year-old newsroom intern. As a news-obsessed kid growing up in Syracuse, N.Y., Muir wrote to his favorite anchor at local TV station WTVH. He wrangled summer internships at the outlet, delivering scripts and Coca-Colas to anchors and riding in the back of the news cruiser. Station staffers tracked his growth with pencil marks on the newsroom wall. He became an anchor at the station at age 21.
His role model is Peter Jennings. “Peter Jennings was the James Bond of evening news, and I always wanted to be that,” Muir said after being named to the anchor job in 2014. “His evening news was really a conversation with America.” A 21-year veteran of ABC News, Muir started reporting for “ABC World News” in 2003 and traveled the world extensively, as Jennings did.
He is the second- longest tenured “ABC World News” anchor in the network’s history. Muir took over for Diane Sawyer in 2012 and his 12 years in the chair rank behind only the 22 years Jennings put in from 1983 to 2005, the year of his death.
Davis is a bestselling author. The mother of a 10-year-old son, she has written six children’s books including her latest title, “Girls of the World,” which made the New York Times bestseller list.
The first Black woman to moderate a presidential debate is a Davis mentor. Carole Simpson, a longtime Washington correspondent at ABC News, made history in 1992 when she handled the proceedings with George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. She also spent years as the Sunday anchor of “ABC World News Tonight,” the same role Davis has now. They chat about her work weekly.
She’s running. Davis and her husband have traveled the country to compete in half-marathons. They have finished races in 46 states.
Her big get: She was the only journalist to land an interview with comedian Bill Cosby after he was accused of sexual assault by multiple women.
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