Debate Commission to Make Format Change10/01 06:14

   

   NEW YORK (AP) -- The presidential debate commission says it will soon adopt 
changes to its format to avoid a repeat of the disjointed first meeting between 
President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden.

   The commission said Wednesday that the debate "made clear that additional 
structure should be added to the format of the remaining debates to ensure a 
more orderly discussion of the issues."

   One possibility being discussed is to give the moderator the ability to cut 
off the microphone of one of the debate participants while his opponent is 
talking, according to a person familiar with the deliberations who was not 
authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

   The next presidential debate is a town hall format scheduled for Oct. 15 in 
Miami.

   Meanwhile, the Nielsen company said that 73.1 million people watched the 
debate on television, where it was shown on 16 networks. That's more than any 
other television event since the Super Bowl, even if it fell short of the 84 
million who watched the first debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016. 
That was the most-watched presidential debate ever.

   Moderator Chris Wallace struggled to gain control of Tuesday's debate in 
Cleveland because of frequent interruptions, primarily by Trump. The candidates 
interrupted Wallace or their opponent 90 times in the 90-minute debate, 71 of 
them by Trump, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

   Wallace, of Fox News, pleaded for a more orderly debate, at one point 
looking at Trump and saying, "the country would be better served if we allowed 
both people to speak with fewer interruptions. I'm appealing to you, sir, to do 
that."

   "Ask him, too," Trump said.

   "Well, frankly, you've been doing more interrupting than he has," Wallace 
said.

   Biden on Wednesday called the debate "a national embarrassment." But despite 
some suggestions that the final two presidential encounters be canceled, both 
campaigns said they expected their candidate to attend.

   Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said the commission was 
"only doing this because their guy got pummeled last night. President Trump was 
the dominant force and now Joe Biden is trying to work the refs."

   ABC News' Martha Raddatz, who moderated one of the three Trump-Clinton 
debates in 2016, said Wallace was put in nearly an impossible situation. Faced 
with the same behavior, she said she might have called a full stop to the 
debate for a moment to recalibrate.

   She never had the option, technically, to cut off the microphone of a 
candidate four years ago, she said. It also wasn't in the rules that were 
agreed to in advance by the candidates and commission.

   "To say, 'He's not going to follow the rules so we aren't, either' --- it's 
an unprecedented situation," Raddatz said. "That was so out of control."

   Twitter was ablaze with criticism for Wallace early in the debate for losing 
control of the proceedings. That was illustrated by MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, 
who tweeted, "What is Chris Wallace doing? He has no control over the debate. 
He asks a question and let's Trump continue yelling. This is a disgrace."

   By the time he was on "Morning Joe'' the next morning, Scarborough had 
cooled off. He called on the debate commission to act.

   "While it was extraordinarily frustrating, I think all of us need to walk a 
mile in his shoes before saying the morning after, 'He could have done this, he 
could have done that,'" Scarborough said.

   Some of the president's supporters felt that Wallace was too hard on their 
candidate. Trump himself suggested he was also debating Wallace, "but that's no 
surprise."

   Wallace even got some criticism from opinion personalities on his own 
network. "Trump is debating the moderator and Biden," primetime host Laura 
Ingraham tweeted during the debate.

   Another Fox colleague, Geraldo Rivera, expressed more sympathy.

   "The guy signed up to moderate a debate and he ended up trying to referee a 
knife fight," he said.

   Wallace, host of "Fox News Sunday," was not immediately made available for 
comment by Fox.

   There is some skepticism about what the commission can do that is really 
meaningful. "I'm not sure that there's a format change that can solve that 
problem," said Sen. Pat Toomey, Republican, of battleground state Pennsylvania.

   Wallace is the only presidential debate moderator this cycle with prior 
experience, after receiving praise for handling the final Clinton-Trump debate 
in 2016. The other two moderators are Steve Scully of C-SPAN and Kristen Welker 
of NBC News.

   Scully moderates the Miami debate, a town hall format where citizens get to 
ask questions, which may make interruptions more difficult.

   "Having prepared for these, the town hall is a completely different event in 
the debate Olympics," tweeted David Plouffe, an adviser to former President 
Barack Obama. "If Trump brings the same nastiness to Florida, it will be doubly 
painful to watch but it will be doubly painful for him politically."