The fallout from the botched presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris continues. Three more developments call into question the fairness and integrity of the two moderators and debate sponsor, ABC News:
- Yesterday, the news surfaced that moderator Linsey Davis is a sorority sister of Vice President Kamala Harris.
- A former Clinton operative, Mark Penn, demanded that ABC come clean about the rigged debate with an investigation conducted by an objective outsider.
- And the Black Insurrectionist X feed vowed to release evidence from a network whistleblower who says that Harris received the questions in advance and knew that moderators would only fact check Trump.
The conduct of the debate has disgraced the network, and to the degree it had a reputation, that reputation is ruined.
The Sisterhood
The New York Post reported the Davis-Harris connection.
“Davis, 46, sparked backlash when she fought back against the former president’s false claims that doctors were discussing aborting babies after birth, with Republicans arguing that the ABC moderator was not nearly as tough on Harris’ erroneous assertions,” the Post explained:
Now, it has come to light that the two were both members of Alpha Kappa Alpha.
Harris became a member of the sisterhood when she was an undergraduate student at Howard University in Washington.
The Democratic presidential nominee graduated from the private, historically black university in 1986 with a bachelor of arts.
Davis became an Alpha Kappa Alpha sister when she was an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, where she graduated in 1999 with a bachelor’s in psychology.
The two sorority sisters have met at least once before during an ABC one-on-one interview last year.
In fact, Trump’s claim was not false, as video of former Virginia Governor Ralph Northam showed. Northam is a pediatric neurologist.
As well, U.S. House Democrats voted against a bill that would have required doctors to provide life-saving treatment for infants born after a failed abortion.
That fact aside, the obvious question is why Davis was permitted to moderate the debate, and why she didn’t disclose her relationship with Harris.
An X user explained the problem. Above all else, loyalty to other sorority members is paramount.
“As a sorority sister myself I can speak from first hand knowledge,” she wrote:
You become part of a tradition, a legacy and are inter-connected for life. There is not ONE national sorority that does not live this philosophical belief. It’s a social contract you actively pledge to uphold.
The two women “can NOT claim they have ‘no association’ without challenging the entire legacy of sisterhood,” the thread continued.
Nor can the sorority claim that Davis and Harris have no relationship. The sorority hosted Harris for an event, the user noted.
The WorldNetDaily X feed posted video of Davis and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, a former Clinton torpedo, discussing the sorority during coverage of President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Sorority members, Davis said, expected Harris to wear a string of pearls, a symbol of the sisterhood.
Penn’s Demand
As for Penn, the former top Clinton advisor told John Solomon of Just the News that ABC must launch an internal investigation with an independent law firm.
“I don’t know what they told the Harris campaign,” Penn said:
I think the day after, suspicion here is really quite high, and I think a review of all their internal texts and emails really should be done by an independent party to find out to what extent they were planning on, in effect, you know, fact-checking just one candidate and in effect, rigging the outcome of this debate. I think the situation demands nothing less than that.
Also, Solomon observed that Harris is bosom buddies with Dana Walden, co-chairman of Disney, which owns ABC. Walden supervises ABC News. Harris and Walden, The New York Times reported, are “extraordinary friends.” Furthermore, Walden has pumped money into Harris’ campaigns for 20 years.
Whistleblower Claims Debate Was Rigged
The report from Black Insurrectionist also went viral yesterday.
“I will be releasing an affidavit from an ABC whistleblower regarding the debate,” the X poster promised.
The whistleblower alleged that Harris received “sample question[s] which were essentially the same questions that were given during the debate and separate assurances of fact checking Donald Trump and that she would NOT be fact checked.”
Those claims are unverified, but that is exactly what happened, as critics such as Glenn Greenwald have observed.
“Never once, not a single time, did the moderators ever tell Kamala Harris that anything she said was out of context, was misleading, was deceitful, was exaggerated, or was false,” he wrote:
And it’s not because Kamala Harris spoke for 90 minutes without uttering false statements. She had an endless number of false statements that she uttered that could easily and should easily have been subject to fact-checking.
That ABC’s moderators were openly hostile to Trump and easy on Harris is no surprise.
The Media Research Center’s Newsbusters analyzed moderator David Muir’s coverage of the two candidates. Coverage of Harris was 100 percent positive; coverage of Trump was 93 percent negative.
