Those who accused the network and the moderators of bias particularly pointed to the way Trump and Kamala were treated in terms of fact-checking. Trump was peppered with follow-up questions and fact-checks whenever he got a good point in or made a claim, whereas VP Harris was generally able to dodge questions or lie about Trump with no real push back.

At times, that bias bordered on the absurd. For example, co-moderator David Muir was, at one point, engaged in a testy back and forth with former President Trump over whether Trump had been sarcastic or not, with Muir attempting to “fact-check” Trump’s claim that he was being sarcastic. Meanwhile, Kamala pushed debunked hoaxes like the “very fine people” hoax and wasn’t fact-checked for it.

The idea that bias would be present during the debate shouldn’t have been hard to predict ahead of time, as co-moderator Linsey Davis had suggested, falsely, in August that Trump had ties to the Ku Klux Klan, and an analysis of coverage found that the other co-moderator, David Muir, gave Harris 99% positive coverage and Trump 93% negative coverage.

Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fletcher, commenting on the fact-checking situation and how it was a bias problem for the network. Fletcher said, in a post on X (formerly Twitter), “ABC is making a huge mistake trying to fact check this live. They’re only proving how biased they are. Harris fabricated an attack on Trump over IVF. ABC sat there and said nothing.”