Thursday’s presidential debate may or may not turn out to be a big deal for Joe Biden and Donald Trump. But it’s a banner moment for CNN, which has managed to privatize and mete out access to a democratic tradition that used to be under the control of a nonprofit. Whether you are watching the debate or doing business surrounding it, CNN will not let you forget just how much it’s in charge.
Since the 1980s, the Commission on Presidential Debates has run these things. The nonprofit was the brainchild of the national Democratic and Republican parties during a different era of politics. The CPD picked the debate sites and the hosts, and it also produced the broadcast feed that news outlets across the world picked up and sent out to their own audiences. Those publications could offer original pre- and postgame commentary, with their own editorial talent. Newspapers, TV channels, and digital outlets of varying stripes could run their own produced simulcasts.
It’s not that the public was any better informed because people could watch the debate with either a CBS or NBC logo in the corner of their screen. It’s that nobody should own presidential debates, and the more outlets that can cover them how they want, the more casual observers of politics they might sweep up. It was better than making everyone go to one TV channel, or even a few.
That’s over now. CNN is hosting the debate at its Atlanta studio. CNN is producing the event, right down to where the cameras point and when the microphones go on and off. CNN is distributing it to some competitors and withholding it from others. CNN has decided who will moderate the event (Jake Tapper and Dana Bash). CNN is offering the only commentary during the telecast. CNN gets to decide who, beyond the essentials, is in the room. That is all tremendous for David Zaslav, the chief executive of CNN parent Warner Bros. Discovery. It cannot, however, be anything good for the rest of us.
Media competitors seem the angriest about CNN’s power over the debate. The major news networks will be able to run CNN’s feed, but they’ll have to present it as just that: CNN’s feed. Bloomberg reported that rival channels will have to call the debate the “CNN Presidential Debate” in all marketing and TV listings and that they’ll have to air the full-screen feed with CNN’s logo visible. During commercial breaks—not a thing during traditional CPD debates, but a thing on cable TV—the networks will not be able to cut away for their own analysis. In fact, at no time during the debate can they provide their own commentary. CNN won’t just produce the feed but will run the show for all of television.
In some sense, none of this is your problem unless you are an executive at a mass media company that is not CNN. You may not mind hearing only from CNN editorial talent during the debate, and you might click away immediately to another channel’s reaction after it’s over. But being the only outlet that can frame it for audiences in real time gives CNN a shocking amount of power. Tapper and Bash won’t have any more influence than would the moderator of a debate run under the CPD. But their employer will unilaterally decide everything else about the live telecast: when the candidates’ mics are on, where the camera cuts, and what text appears on the screen.
Non-TV outlets will have an even more limited set of options for sharing the debate: They’ll be able to post an embeddable YouTube player of CNN’s feed, and that’s it, lest they risk a legal fight. I asked CNN what options digital outlets have for airing and customizing the debate, and a representative replied, “CNN’s debates are exclusive to CNN and may not be streamed or streamed with verbal or digital commentary on any platform or social media site by another party, other than the embeddable YouTube player via the CNN YouTube channel.” That will wreck the ability of other media outlets to carry the debate online, whether they be newspapers or partisan podcasting and streaming empires.
There’s one more weird thing: Bloomberg reported that the network won’t let journalists from outlets other than CNN into the studio room that will host the debate, citing what Bloomberg termed “security and space concerns.” At a typical debate, reporters from all over are in the hall. Here, there apparently will be no journalists on hand other than CNN’s to point out anything that the broadcast might have missed or omitted. No, democracy probably will not turn because Biden made a dismissive hand gesture that the camera didn’t catch and that independent media, absent from the debate room, didn’t write into a pool report. But CNN is a major stakeholder in the debate. Reporters who do not work for the network should be there.
The network is just protecting its turf, attempting to get as many eyeballs as possible on CNN platforms and to control the environment on a big night for its company. But in its corporatization of the debate, the network has planted the seeds for an environment that is certain to get really dumb. Already, conservative media have begun discussing CNN’s restriction on independent broadcasting as an effort to shield Biden from criticism and pull a hood over voters’ eyes. “It’s allowing a biased network, that in the past has likened Trump to Hitler, to control who can and cannot fact-check this man,” conservative influencer Tim Pool told his listeners this week. “And as we know, it’s special rules for this debate. They are seeking to control that narrative.” Pool has 2 million followers on X. Elon Musk told Pool in a reply to one of his posts that the platform will not honor copyright takedown requests. (Another win for CNN: allowing a guy like Musk the easiest layup ever to burnish his reputation as a defender of free expression.)
The lack of non-CNN reporters on hand will feed into similar conservative talking points over the next few days: The microphone was tampered with, the lighting was meant to make Trump look too leathery, Biden was falling asleep behind the lectern on a cutaway and nobody bothered to report it. Mediocre influencers and podcasters would make these points anyway, to be sure, but the denial of access to anyone other than CNN’s own journalists will make this work easier for them.
Attempting to limit bad-faith interpretations of big political news events is like trying to drink the world’s oceans dry. But at a moment when American trust in news media is indeed quite low, perhaps the first big-ticket political TV event of the year shouldn’t be entirely in the hands of one media company that acts as programmer, interrogator, and gatekeeper. There’s no particular reason why CNN should have this much power. It holds the cards because Biden and Trump have each griped about the CPD and found CNN and ABC News to be palatable hosts for this year’s two debates. Maybe Trump was fine with CNN because he could easily reframe the outlet for his base as a boogeyman out to keep him down. Maybe Biden was fine with it because he’s not confident in his debating skills and preferred for the first one to be on cable rather than broadcast television. Maybe both candidates just wanted to have a close-up look at Tapper’s brilliantly coiffed hairline. CNN is the only outlet positioned to find out.