“But are you going to shut up? », “Impossible to place one with this clown! » On the eve of the televised duel between Joe Biden and Donald Trump on CNN, most Americans still remember their first televised debate in September 2020, which turned into a fistfight.
“America was disgusted” by this duel, says the editorialist of Los Angeles Times Shelby Grad, recalling that a poll carried out by the CBS channel after the broadcast of the debate showed that a “a large majority of those questioned found the tone of the meeting negative and felt annoyed”. This is the scenario that the campaign teams of Joe Biden and Donald Trump want at all costs to avoid reliving this Thursday, June 27, while the Democrat and the Republican are still neck and neck in the polls and the hunting for undecided voters is becoming more urgent.
Deterioration of the quality of exchanges
To try to regain control of the debate, the candidates decided this year to completely do without the services of the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), a non-partisan institution responsible for organizing the duels between the two presidential favorites since 1988. Biden, Trump and CNN negotiated new rules directly with each other. Rather than organizing a first duel in the fall as the CPD wished, the candidates chose to face each other in June, which gives them more time to rectify the situation in the event of a catastrophic performance.
To prevent the discussions from turning into a cockfight, the debate will take place in a studio without an audience in Atlanta, and the microphones will be deactivated. “except for the candidate whose turn it is to speak” in order to “ensure a civilized discussion”, specifies CNN. But the channel, at the same time, obtained two advertising breaks, unheard of during a presidential debate. While CNN intends to take advantage of this event to boost its flagging ratings, some critical voices fear a commercialization of the debate leading to a deterioration in the quality of discussions.
“This is unprecedented and it is shameful. The introduction of commercial breaks will fundamentally change what makes a debate a debate”believes, in an interview with the magazine PoliticoClea Conner, director of Open to Debate, a nonprofit that works to restore critical thinking and civility to American public discourse.
She fears that these cuts will quickly eat into the discussion time. The candidates’ arguments “will have to be shorter”, which could lead to “more outrageous interactions to increase ratings”, she emphasizes. According to Open to Debate, the number of themes discussed has increased in a few decades from around thirty to twenty today.
The weight of social networks
The looping broadcast on social networks of short extracts from the duel intended to create buzz could also undermine the candidates’ attempts to control the course of the debate. “George H. Bush greatly regretted looking at his watch in 1992 when facing Bill Clinton (…). But that was already long before Facebook and Twitter,” recalls James Lindsay, vice-president of the Council on Foreign Relations, an American think tank. “Today the slightest misstep can be watched and re-watched all over the world and even before the debate is over. »
An innocuous sequence can thus easily be transformed into something ” harmful “ by political adversaries, he notes, referring to a recent truncated video of Biden at the G7 in Italy, giving the impression that the 81-year-old president was wandering through the aisles of the summit looking haggard, greeting the void. A worrying phenomenon for candidates when half of Americans say they get their information regularly thanks to social networks.
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Exchanges that remain in the memories
– Obama-Romney, October 22, 2012:
Facing outgoing President Barack Obama, Mitt Romney deplores that the American navy has fewer ships than in 1916. “We also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our army has changed. We have what are called aircraft carriers, on which planes land. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines,” responds by mocking Barack Obama.
– Reagan-Mondale, 21 octobre 1984 :
At 73, Ronald Reagan declared to his challenger Walter Mondale, 56: “I’m not going to turn age into a campaign issue. I will not exploit, for political reasons, the youth and inexperience of my opponent. »
– Ford-Carter, October 6, 1976:
Outgoing Republican President Gerald Ford commits an irreparable blunder during the second duel against Jimmy Carter. In the midst of the Cold War, he ensures that“There is no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
