ABC News’s David Muir experienced a decline in ratings in his flagship show after his controversial performance as one of the moderators of the presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Muir was a debate moderator alongside Linsey Davis, frequently fact-checking Trump while failing to do so for Harris. Muir was criticized for disputing the former president’s claim that crime was going up by countering with incomplete data and questioning whether he was being sarcastic or not in a previous interview. The flak Muir took from the experience appears to have taken a toll on his ratings.
According to Fox News, Muir’s ABC World News Tonight ratings fell by 12% after the debate, with an average of 6.7 million viewers on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, compared to an average of 7.6 million before the debate.
That was a substantially steeper decline than that suffered by CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News.
Muir and Davis have faced heavy criticism from Trump and Republicans for their performances as moderators.
“Every one of them should have been questioned by David Muir, who I’ve lost a lot of respect for,” Trump told Fox News last week. “Everyone’s lost respect for him.”
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“It was so … one-sided,” he added. “It was one against three.”
Muir claimed in one of his fact checks of Trump that FBI crime statistics showed that violent crime was going down, but the data showing such a trend was “based on data received from 13,719 of 19,268 law enforcement agencies in the country,” excluding high-crime areas such as New York and Los Angeles.