After the fourth Republican debate concluded at the University of Alabama, members gathered around the Frank Moody Music Building to speculate about who the winner was.
In an hour, I had my answer: the women, and men, of NewsNation, who put on a first-rate debate show.
“I think the American people won,” said Beth Feldman the Senior VP of Network Communications for the CW Network and VP of Communications for Nexstar Media Inc., with great humility. But it didn’t take long after talking with her and her colleagues to discover the secret behind perhaps one of the best produced primary debates in recent political history. In doing so, I learned what it takes to put on such a strong political performance.
NewsNation doesn’t exactly have the name recognition and power of the big networks, like ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN or MSNBC, providing an additional challenge for the upstart network. But this organization, owned by Nexstar Media Group, Inc., does reach 70 million households. And it’s not afraid to let women take the lead for such a critical project, teamed with Rumble, an online video platform that’s about ten years old.
The most telegenic faces of the debate were NewsNation news anchor Elizabeth Vargas, Megyn Kelly of Sirius XM, and Eliana Johnson, the Washington Free Beacon editor, who did their best to reign in the rule-breaking excesses of the candidates.
“Moderating this debate was one of the highlights of my career!” Vargas said in an email communique sent to me. “We worked incredibly hard to craft smart, pointed questions, and encourage the candidates to actually debate each other – as they are meant to do. What I didn’t expect was how much I enjoyed this! The two hours flew by – and we had a dozen more questions we would have loved to ask. I am so proud that many have said this was the best debate so far this presidential campaign season. And we proved that NewsNation, a brand-new cable news network, is ready for primetime.”
But the anchors were hardly the only women playing a key role in the December 6 debate. “Women were not just in front of the camera, but behind the scenes as well, Feldman explained. A male news executive with her nodded his approval. “You’ve got to be smart and thorough to put on a debate performance like that,” she continued. “This is our Super Bowl,” said Network President Michael Corn in a quote for Variety magazine, and you saw a lot of evidence of that.
As a kid, I grew up watching debates sponsored by The League of Women Voters in the 1970s and 1980s. But those debates became co-opted by the political parties. The parties then provided so many restrictions and rules on the LWV that it couldn’t run the debates and maintain its independence in holding the candidates and supporters accountable.
It’s a different world from that era today. Just look at the optics of the 1976 debate between President Ford and Governor Jimmy Carter. And who can forget the horribly awkward audio problems that painfully delayed one of the debates by almost a half-hour?
“You’ve got to make sure every detail is covered,” said Cherie Grzech, Senior VP of News & Politics/Managing Editor at NewsNation. “That includes microphone checks, sound checks, what colors appear behind the candidates. Their images on the screen have to be identical, providing no privilege to any one candidate. There are hundreds of things that need to be done right so that everything flows well.”
The role women played in making it happen showed how far we’ve come. We talked about the days when a female reporter was harassed in an NFL team’s locker room, and I remembered the #MeToo movement born from how women were treated in news journalism. “I’d say the changes were evolutionary,” Feldman added. The esteem her male colleagues gave her around the hub of post-debate media activity showed that the respect was earned.
Though the ratings for the debate were 4.1 million (a combination of NewsNation and The CW) — leading ex-President Donald Trump to criticize Megyn Kelly for the numbers — those reflect traditional measures of media consumption. And for the record, the Tuscaloosa, Alabama performance bested Trump’s Town Hall, which attracted only 3.2 million viewers.
The performance set a NewsNation record for viewership, helping put the network on the political map in a new way. It also led to a spike in newer forms of media reach. Rumble claims “according to @StreamsCharts, last night’s fourth @GOP debate more than doubled its average viewers vs the third debate stream.”
In the coming days, we’re sure to hear more about the interest the debate generated by viewers who find creative ways of accessing the debate that old forms of ratings surveys just don’t capture. In the 2024 election, NewsNation should get a similar, well-deserved opportunity to host another such debate between the political parties.
John A. Tures is Professor of Political Science and Coordinator of the Political Science Program at LaGrange College, in LaGrange, Georgia.