As per the norm, there are varying opinions as to who “won” and “lost” Tuesday night’s highly-anticipated ABC News presidential debate.
After having set the bar so low for her heading into the event that all she needed to do was show up and survive it, the consensus among the media/left, of course, is that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris won the debate.
Conservatives in general, on the other hand, feel like GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump got in some good jabs himself and that the VP lost it because she was short on substance, long on the scripted lines, and was heavily aided by the co-moderators in what turned out to be a biased three-on-one against Trump.
READ MORE: ABC News ‘Moderators’ Made a Joke of the Presidential Debate
But while the moderators are facing intense and well-earned criticism in the aftermath of the debate debacle, I submit that the real loser of the night was, arguably, CNN’s Daniel Dale.
Now, we’ve been reliably informed that Dale’s role is “fact checker” but, as we’ve documented many times before, his “fact checks” all tend to favor one side over the other.
And that is exactly what happened during and after the debate between Harris and Trump, with Dale gaslighting on steroids about how often Harris told a whopper:
Trump has been staggeringly dishonest and Harris has been overwhelmingly (though not entirely) factual.
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) September 11, 2024
His partner in crime, Brian Stelter, eagerly promoted Dale’s “findings”:
According to @ddale8‘s preliminary count, “Trump made at least 33 false claims.” Harris made at at least 1. pic.twitter.com/DJ1uaJwAfO
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) September 11, 2024
I am so happy they are both back pic.twitter.com/thK0Y27X67
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) September 11, 2024
It goes without saying that the American people aren’t served well by the media at all when they aren’t doing their jobs, which is to hold all sides accountable. But again, this is nothing new for Dale.
Just to prove to everyone how Dale views fact-checking Trump versus Democrats, let us once again take a look at these gems:
This president says some inaccurate stuff. Not ideal. But there’s no pretending that this era is remotely similar to the last president’s staggering daily avalanche of extreme wrongness.
My fact-check look at Biden’s first 100 days: https://t.co/BTLAd7bD4N
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) May 2, 2021
Biden was again imperfect from a fact check perspective. He made at least a few false, misleading, or lacking-in-context claims.
Trump was, as usual, a serial liar.
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) October 23, 2020
And perhaps my favorite one of all:
Biden is implicitly fact checking Trump by…uttering many consecutive coherent sentences, which Trump has repeatedly said Biden cannot do. https://t.co/LzS2Bx7ioq
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) September 18, 2020
But back to the current debate, though the moderators and Dale were (predictably) willing to give Harris a pass, we weren’t.
My colleague Nick Arama compiled numerous instances of Harris’ lies, including the repetition of the “bloodbath” and “very fine people” hoaxes as well as the lie about Trump’s (non) involvement in Project 2025. My colleague Jennifer Oliver O’Connell also detailed the phony “fact check” done early on by the moderators on Trump during an exchange on the abortion issue.
There’s so much more from where that came, but I think the point has been made. If anything was proven by last night’s debate, it was that the Democrat/media industrial complex is alive and well and doing exactly what they did in 2020 around this time – feverishly working to try and stack the deck against Trump and Republicans ahead of Election Day.
Flashback–>> Prove Me Wrong: CNN’s ‘Fact-Checking’ Division Has Hit Rock Bottom