Free Republic

Eleven minutes into the June 27 presidential debate, CNN anchor Dana Bash slipped a note to her colleague Jake Tapper after President Biden gave a rambling, incoherent answer. "He just lost the election," she wrote The event at the network's Atlanta studios — recounted in Tapper's and Axios correspondent Alex Thompson's new book, "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again" — turned out to be the most consequential presidential debate in history

Presidential debates are remembered for the candidates’ pithy one-liners. But in the chaotic political landscape of 2024, a simple statement of fact served as the showstopper on Tuesday’s showdown between former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born,” said ABC News moderator Linsey Davis in the matter-of-fact style familiar to viewers who watch her on the Sunday edition of “ABC World News Tonight” and her nightly streaming newscast “ABC News Live Prime.” Her correction was a response to Trump’s claim that the...

There is a new cable news ratings champion. Nielsen data for 2022 rank the Fox News round table program “The Five” as the most watched show in cable news with an average of 3.5 million viewers. The figure tops “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” which averaged 3.3 million viewers for the year. The figure for the Fox News prime-time show is up 3% over 2021 when it was the most watched program for the year. But “The Five” grew more, up 17% over 2021. The program, which airs live at 5 p.m. Eastern and 2 p.m. Pacific, is also the first cable...

s a youthful looking 42-year-old, Jeff Glor is the youngest anchor of “CBS Evening News” since Douglas Edwards first sat in the chair in 1948. It’s not all they have in common. Edwards was a veteran radio journalist who was asked to move over to television when it was still a young, emerging medium. Glor, who took over the broadcast on Monday, has a mandate to lead the flagship evening newscast into the digital future. The assignment comes as the evening news format is fighting to remain vital in an age when smartphones can provide headlines and video instantly. CBS...

Reporting from Cleveland -- With the Republican presidential debate less than 10 hours away, Fox News anchors Chris Wallace, Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier sat at a long table with their producers and once again went over the game plan for the big night. They reviewed not just the questions they would ask, but the structure of every query, keeping in mind the constraints of time and the need to avoid repeating topics. As they sorted and re-sorted questions, the unpredictability of real estate tycoon and reality TV star Donald Trump was never far from their minds. Baier even had...