ABC’s “World News Tonight” anchor David Muir may have driven away some viewers after the Disney-owned network angered conservatives during last week’s presidential debate.
Muir and co-moderator Linsey Davis fact-checked former President Donald Trump five times without ever correcting Vice President Kamala Harris, prompting a host of conservatives to suggest the debate was unfair. Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America even called for a correction after Davis made an abortion claim made during the debate during one of her fact-checks on Trump that the group said was “100% incorrect.”
Muir’s “World News Tonight” averaged 6.7 million viewers on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, the three episodes after the debate, after averaging 7.6 million in 2024 leading up to the debate.
The 12% drop in viewers for “World News Tonight” is more significant than the slight declines that “CBS Evening News” and “NBC Nightly News” saw when comparing ABC’s three post-debate episodes to the year-to-date total, though the broadcast Muir’s newscast remained the #1 newscast of the evening.
While it’s unclear whether Trump supporters tuned into the ABC news show at the end of the debate, the former president criticized it as “one-sided.” Trump told Fox News that he believed Harris should have been fact-checked on a number of allegations.
“Each of them should have been questioned by David Muir, for whom I have lost a lot of respect. Everybody has lost respect for him,” Trump said last week.
“It was so … one-sided,” he continued. “It was one against three.”
Davis acknowledged in a post-debate interview that her fact-checking of Trump was influenced by the CNN debate that went disastrously wrong for President Biden in June.
“People were concerned that the statements were allowed to hang and they weren’t [be] contested by candidate Biden, at the time, or by the moderators,” Davis told the Los Angeles Times last week.
On Sunday, ABC News’ Martha Raddatz even pointed out that Harris was wrong when she said that “there is not a single member of the United States military who is on active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world.”
“Our fact checkers found that to be false,” Raddatz said.
“There are currently 900 US military personnel in Syria, 2,500 US troops in Iraq. All have been under regular threat from drones and missiles for months. We also have a stake in the Red Sea,” continued Raddatz. “Also, on any given day, Navy SEALs, Delta Forces special operators can be part of any type of lethal attack.”
Muir and Davis failed to correct Harris in front of the debate’s massive audience of nearly 70 million people.
Fox News Digital’s Hanna Panreck contributed to this report.
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