This week, 10 major broadcast outlets as well as USA Today and the Associated Press signed a joint letter urging both President Joe Biden and his GOP challenger, former President Donald Trump, to debate each other. Though none of the country’s leading newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, or The Wall Street Journal signed, the document represents the opinion of a broad cross-section of the corporate media including the legacy broadcast networks, PBS, and NPR, with one conservative outlet, Fox News, also joining.
The signatories are right. Americans deserve presidential debates in 2024. The debates provide the only chance for voters to see the candidates matched up against each other in person. Their effect on the results may not be as dramatic as the claims made during the usual pre- and post-debate hype. The quality of the discourse and the various formats employed are also usually far from ideal. But they are the most watched element of campaign coverage all year. As such, they give the electorate a better understanding of their choices than the endless stream of television commercials and social media ads to which they are subjected throughout the election cycle.
But despite the pleas of the networks, 2024 is likely to be the first time there will be no presidential debate in over 50 years. And the reason won’t be due to the Republicans’ justified distrust of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which has, despite its claims of bipartisanship, often demonstrated bias in favor
