There will be no audience in the studio, depriving candidates of the momentum that comes from attracting supporters. When a candidate’s speaking time is over, the microphones will turn off. Thursday night’s presidential debate will not be the same as usual.
CNN, which is hosting President Joe Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump for the first debate of the 2024 campaign in Atlanta, wants to avoid the chaos it saw between the two men in 2020.
Here are some facts about the 90-minute debate, a pivotal moment in the race for the White House, but whose impact is hard to predict.
Averting catastrophe
In their first war of words four years ago, Trump repeatedly interrupted the veteran Democrat, delivered long speeches and taunted his opponent, at one point yelling: “Will you shut up, man?”
This was not the height of presidential decorum.
To cut through the noise, CNN has laid out some rules that both campaigns agree on.
Most notably, when the candidates take the stage at the network’s Atlanta studios at 9pm (0100 GMT on Friday), there will be no one in the audience.
Microphones will be muted except when asking a candidate to speak. There will be two ad breaks during the contest between 78-year-old Trump and 81-year-old Biden, the two oldest potential White House candidates in history.
The network said moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, who are both regular on-air presenters on CNN, “will use all tools available to them to enforce time and ensure civilized discussion.”
Trump gets the last word
Biden won the coin toss, giving him the option to either choose his spot on stage or speak first or second in final statements.
The current president chose the stage on the audience’s right, and Trump opted to have the last word.
No live fact-checking
CNN has not revealed the debate topics and does not plan to fact-check the candidates’ statements in real time — even as Trump repeats the baseless accusation that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
According to Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, “One of the problems with debates centered on Donald Trump is that moderators don’t fact-check in real time, nor should they.”
“It’s very risky to try to do that and if they do it will stifle the debate,” he told AFP. “The danger is that rather than providing information, the debate could actually increase the amount of misinformation.”
Biden and Trump will not have teleprompters and cannot bring prewritten notes on stage, though they will be provided with paper and pens. Consultation with campaign staff will not be permitted during ad breaks.
The debate will be aired on all networks
Both candidates rejected the oversight of the nonpartisan Presidential Debate Commission, formed in 1987 to manage such events.
Instead, they struck a direct deal with CNN. The news network, now owned by media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery, offered its rivals the opportunity to broadcast the debate live, under certain conditions, in the name of public service.
The screen must have the CNN logo and outside comments are prohibited.
Fox News — which regularly accuses CNN of being biased against Trump — plans to begin broadcasting two hours before the event, with talk show hosts Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity providing pre-game information.
In the past, Hannity has called Tapper “a radical left-wing partisan talk show host masquerading as a journalist.”
Impact on the campaign?
The debate will surely be a pivotal moment of the campaign, watched by hundreds of millions of people: a record 84 million people tuned in to watch Trump’s first battle with Hillary Clinton in 2016, and 73 million tuned in to watch the 2020 contest between Trump and Biden.
But it isn’t necessarily a game-changer.
This is the first time that the debate has been held so early in the election, more than four months before the election date, and even before the candidates have been formally nominated by their respective parties.
“What is worrying is that the public in the United States doesn’t pay as much attention to the news in the summer,” Jamieson said.
“In general, presidential debates do not influence a large enough number of votes to decide the outcome of an election. But when the election is close, as it is this time, debates can play an important role.”
ABC is scheduled to hold a second debate on September 10.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)