Opinion: Jake Tapper and Dana Bash’s Debate Performance Was an Embarrassment

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Reuters/Getty
Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Reuters/Getty

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President Joe Biden had a rough night Thursday at the debate, but CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash also turned in an abysmal performance of their own, according to The New Abnormal co-hosts Andy Levy and Danielle Moodie.

Neither moderator offered much in the way of follow-up questions or any fact checks for either candidate—something that CNN said in advance they were not going to do.

“Do you know what they were? They weren’t moderators. They were fucking mic stands,” Moodie said in a special debate-night episode. “Like doing nothing, doing nothing, offering nothing.”

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“CNN is one of the reasons mainstream media has never learned, over nine years, how to check Donald Trump, how to challenge Donald Trump in any way,” she added. “All they needed to do was ask that motherfucker a follow-up question and watch his head explode.”

Then, Parker Molloy, writer of the Substack The Present Age, joins the program to talk about the fact-checking site Snopes’ recent determination that Donald Trump actually didn’t call the white supremacists and neo-Nazis at the infamous Charlottesville rally “very fine people”—and why the site is wrong.

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Plus! Katya Schwenk, a reporter at investigative site The Lever, discusses a recent and particularly egregious Supreme Court ruling which allows politicians to accept monetary gifts.

Listen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.

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