Time, and he crowds out everyone and everything else. Every week i hear from viewers that say we are talking too much about trump and not enough about joe biden. And this has been going on for five years. This screen grab is from august 2015 on this very show. I was pointing out that trump was sucking up all the oxygen in the proverbial room during the gop Prime Minister whary. Now Flash Forward to 2020 and trump still dominates tv. We checked cnn, msnbc and fox news this month and trump mentions outranked biden mentions on all three channels. Here is another data point. Google searches for both candidates in the last 30 days, trump is consistently ahead of biden. So whats this about . Well, it reminds me of the old saying that plane crashes are news, but all of the planes that land safely dont make the news. Or maybe the better comparison is to a house. Pictures of an arsonist burning down a house are more shocking than, i dont know, speeches by a guy who is promising to repaint the house. I am sure you can think of a better comparison, but we know that the president is shocking. We know this phenomenon is real. Trump holds nor events and talks longer and tweets more. Biden, on the other hand, is protecting his lead in the polls with a less is more approach. Bidens low Visibility Campaign is working and, he said, perhaps people like politicians more when they see them less. Tim alberta wrote for politico its impossible to actually measure trump fatigue, but it is really even among die hard trump supporters. They feel trapped inside a Reality Tv Show and they want a break even if they dont wanta t new program. Trump is testing the limits of the attention economy. There is a big difference in this election cycle. His rallies are not being shown live all over the place. Sometimes you have to go to his website to watch them. He says so many offensive and outrageous things that he remains a massive news story, that newsroom have to cover. Look, even in my newsroom at cnn within our editorial meetings for this program we talk about the trump dramand a how its crowding out news about biden, whether we need to add a biden segment to the program and what would that be. Well, here it is. This is our trump and biden segment talking about this disparity and how its visible all over the place. Here is the question now though. Is all the attention, all the air time for trump, is it working for him this toime aroud or working against him . I am sure you heard about the ratings for the recent dueling town halls. Trump was outperformed by biden who was on one channel alone. Is that the ultimate sign of trump fatigue . What does it mean . And how does the press need to make sure that we are providing balanced, fair coverage of both of these candidates when there are so many natural differences in the newsworthiness of them . I am joined by an allstar panel of guests who are going to be with me throughout the hour. With me is the staff writer for the atlantic and author of twilight of democracy, ann apple bomb, Harvard Law School professor yohai beijingler. The National Correspondent for Time Magazine and authors of the ones we have been waiting for charlotte alder, and noah shack man. Noah do you talk about this in your newsroom, this trump and biden disparity . Yeah, all the time. Its real. Its important and its unfortunate in a lot of ways. Look, in some ways it reflects the dynamics of the race, too, right . There is not really in some ways a race between joe biden and donald trump. There is a race between two coalitions. A protrump coalition and an antitrump coalition headed by joe biden. Look at joe bidens look at his coalition, right. He has angela davis and nom chomsky on one end and bill crystal on the other end. The only thing they agree on is that they hate trump. So you see that reflected in the coverage as well. Charlotte, do you pick up on this in your interviews with voters . You have been writing about this for Time Magazine. Do they notice that trump takes up all the oxygen in the room . Yeah, they do, and one of the things that i noticed in my trip across the battleground states, its not just on the news that trump is sort of dominating. His visibility out in the real world is overwhelming compared to bidens. And that has a lot to do with, you know, problems the Biden Campaign has had in terms of getting their yard signs out, you know, people complain about their yard signs being stolen and i understand that the campaign is actively working on that and trying to fix that. But when you drive around, you see a lot more trump than you see of biden, and it sort of like reflects in some ways the news coverage. But also i think this is partly an Enthusiasm Gap between the two camps. The people who are protrump are really protrump, and some of the people who are not for trump kind of dont really want to get into it as much it seems to me. Right. I was driving earned bucks county, pennsylvania, yesterday and counting the number of signs. Every time i thought biden was ahead, there was another crop. Trump signs. These are anecdotes, right . There is no real data we can use about signs. We cant resist the count, cant resist watching this. Ann, you have a global perspective. You are coming from outside of the United States. I want to see your view inside the u. S. Of this present situation. A lot of liberals in the u. S. Feel like the press has been tilted towards trump even though the coverage is very critical most of the time because we are constantly talking about him. That means he is winning. How do you see it . Oh, i am not sure that talking about him all the time means he is winning. You know, we saw what was the result of the first debate. Remember it seemed to trump he was winning that debate and he seemed to say so afterwards because he was dominating the conversation, constantly interrupting biden, you know, he made his points over and over again, repeated himself, and yet we saw afterwards that people were really rappelled by that performance and they recoiled from it. And so im not sure that more attention necessarily means more votes. Quite a lot of the attention is not just that the attention is negative. Its that the more people see of trump remember that most people follow politics the way people on this program do. They dont watch it every minute. And the more they see him in action, the more they hear him, the more they seem to be rappelled by him. It may not be a bad thing. We will preview the next debate in a couple of minutes. I want to ask about the bigger picture, the status of this election, because almost every day the current president is saying and doing things to try to delegitimize this election. His latest lie is that biden is illegitimate. These are a couple of tweets from october, one from earlier in the month, one from this morning, the meta message from the president is that biden shouldnt be allowed to run or he is not allowed to run, he is not qualified to run, he is not legitimate, he shouldnt be allowed to win the presidency. This is yet another flavor of this really dangerous narrative from the sitting president. Is this ultimately a test for american democracy . What is this . Absolutely its a test for american democracy. Dont forget this is a president who started his entire political existence with the Birther Movement and with the idea that the sitting president of the United States was constitutionally unable to be a president. So what you have is a sustained attack on the possibility that if you are not with him, youre at all eligible. And he has to differentiate himself in that way because he has nothing actually to show for himself. And we focus very heavily on trump, but at some point we should expand a little bit to look at the Republican Party nor generally. And when you look at the the republicans are in an electoral dead end. What does that mean . Here is the basic problem. They are stuck in, for 40 years now, the Republican Coalition has basically been money focused on deregulation and low taxes, funding a party where the votes come from the white identity voters backlash against the civil rights movement, and the fundamentalist backlash against the womens movement. So you have this coalition, and it kept becoming more and more constrained as it started to feed from rush limbaugh, from fox news into its own extremism. So what you have now is essentially a party that cant expand beyond its base, and its not just trump claiming illegitimacy of biden. You see it in greg abbotts effort to suppress the vote in texas. You see it in pennsylvania with the state legislature. Because they are a persistent Minority Party based on very narrow foundations with a very relation that is a shrinking part of the electorate, they have no choice but to lean as heavily as they can on the most antidemocratic aspects of the american republic. When we hear about minority rule and we hear about this backlash, you are putting it into context for us. After the break talking about the recent moderators and a big problem that the commission on president ial debates has. Thats next. H i could get a deal on a smartphone, but im not a new customer. Well, actually now, new and existing customers can get our best smartphone deal. Its historic. That is historic. Which means. Im making history, right . Yea, i dont know if id exactly sa wow. Me, dave brown. Existing customer who got the greatest deal in history. Just like every other customer gets. Oh thats cool too. Its not complicated. At t is making history. Everyone gets our best smartphone deals, including the lates preorders. Are you managing. Using fingersticks . With the new freestyle libre 2 system, a continuous glucose monitor, you can check your glucose with a painless, onesecond scan. And now with optional alarms, you can choose to be notified if you go too high or too low. And for those who qualify, the freestyle libre 2 system is now covered by medicare. Ask your doctor for a prescription. When we hear about minority without fingersticks. Learn more at freestyle libre 2 dot u. S. Joe biden was raised with middle class values. Joe doesnt need to be the center of attention. Or see himself on tv. He has always focused on getting the job done. Joe led us out of the 2008 recession, and increased Health Coverage for millions. As president , joe will focus on getting us out of our crises. Hell listen to experts, work across the aisle. And put the American People first. Ff pac is responsible for the content of this ad. After the chaos in cleveland, aka the first president ial debate of the fall, the Commission Said that additional structure was needed to ensure a more orderly discussion. The they said there will be additional tools to maintain order, whatever that means. 18 days later the commission has not announced anything about new structure or new tools. Will the producers cut the microphone of a serial interrupter . We dont know. We shall see on thursday hopefully, because President Trump says he, quote, will play the game and show up this time after skimming wh skipping the second debate. He is working the ref, unfairly attacking Kristen Welker of nbc. And look, this is a tried and true trump tactic, making excuses ahead of time. Here is trump talking with welker on saturday. I have known her for a long time. She is extraordinarily unfair, but thats all right. Okay. Here is trump praising her back in january. Congratulations on your show. Thank you very much. They made a very wise decision. Thank you. And we invite you for an interview whenever you are available. Okay. Need i say more . Charlotte alter and noah strakt man are back with me. There should be a third debate on thursday coming up. Lets go back in in time to the dueling town halls that were held last thursday. Savannah guthrie was praised by seemingly everybody in the journalism world for poking and prodding and following up on President Trump when he was dodging questions and spreading misinformation at thursdays town hall. And for that the president is trashing Savannah Guthrie. He has been trashing her for days now. Lets take a look at some of what he said about her. And savannah, the anger, the craziness. You watched last night and you see the anger and the hatred. I am saying, look, lets just do this thing. Just take it easy. Relax. Just relax. Take it nice and easy, okay . Last night was she was out of line. All right. Charlotte, the president has well documented issues with women journalists. Is this part of that trend . Yeah. I mean, listen, the president has he saves his most personal attacks for women and particularly for women journalists. As we were talking about in the earlier segment, trump, you know, hes not really necessarily running against joe biden. He is kind of running against the media itself. So, you know, thats why some of the of the negative coverage and tough questions dont really seem to resonate with his base because the enemy, as he said many times, or as he tried to argue many times, or the questioners. Is the media itself. So he is feeding into that situation that he has created where he is not really running against joe biden. He is running against the entire idea of media scrutiny and the entire idea that somebody would be really, you know, holding his feet to the fire in a way that Savannah Guthrie did. I am glad you said that. People didnt just see what the big deep story he is telling is. Even though you can dismiss it as nonsense, its a deep story about being everything out to get him. Everyone out to get him. Every institution, even the Debate Commission. Thats the story he tells every day at his rallies. Thats appealing or its not. But thats the story he tells. So these clashes with Savannah Guthrie, youre right, they are part of a bigger narrative. So, noah, do he see a tale of two moderators between Chris Wallace at the debate that is happen and then Savannah Guthrie at the town hall on nbc . Can we learn from their different strategies . Yeah, look, Chris Wallace, and id add George George stepht the abc town hall with biden kind of let those guys go on and on and on unchecked. Savannah guthrie, i thought, did a great job by getting, trying to get answers out of trump, getting in his face, really demanding that he answer the questions. And i am really hoping that in this next debate coming up they follow the Savannah Guthrie model rather than the George Stephanopoulos or Chris Wallace model. Steve skuli was to be the moderator of the second debate. He is the cspan veteran, a journalist beloved by the washington Political Class and yet he admitted to lying when he said he was hacked. He said his twitter account was hacked and thats somehow why a tweet from him to scare popped up on his twitter feed. He admitted he was lying and cspan suspended him for lying. How much damage does this do, noah, to the National News media as a whole when you have a pr prominent journalist admitting to lying under pressure . He is not the first prominent journalist to lie about some tweet he was no longer proud of. He is not the first prominent journalist to claim to have been hacked and then not. Its a trend that pops up here and again, and it is ugly and its really got to stop. This idea of, oh, it wasnt me, it was a random hacker is ridiculous. People have got to own their mistakes. They have got to be able to say that they did wrong. Nobodys perfect. Perfect isnt on the menu. So people can say, hey look, i made a mistake with that tweet rather than blaming it on some phantom figure. Yeah, it definitely does damage. Looking ahead to this last debate, what should have been the third debate, it will be the second debate, the Debate Commission is being mum about what they are doigoing to do. I think they are afraid trump is will back out again. I asked this morning. I have been emailing and texting and not getting answers about what is going to change in the foreclosure mat and structure to have a debate. That raises the broader question. Is this Debate Commission just, is it, you know, is it obsolete. You wrote a book about millennials and politics. The Debate Commission is very old. Folks have been around for decades. You know, maybe they have the best of intentions. I think thats true. They have the best of intentions. Th is this Debate Commission idea obsolete . You know, i dont think that the idea of a Debate Commission is obsolete because i think that there need to be rules for any of these contests and there need to be rules for the events where the two candidates face off against each other. I do think that there are [ inaudible ] needs to have that are a little bit obsolete. I think there is an assumption that they are going to set these guidelines and that candidates are going to transport them out of politeness and decency and all of the sort of ideals of a political age gone by, that clearly dont necessarily apply anymore. I think we saw that in the first debate, the idea they set the rules and the candidates would just respect them because they are the rules, and then trump clearly trampled all over that. So i think that these again, these very experience experienced and distinguished political minds who make up the Debate Commission are beginning to learn that they actually have to put a little bit of bite behind their rules and do some enforcement because they are dealing with a candidate who has no respect for these kinds of institutional guardrails. Right, exactly. We will see between now and thursday what the commission is going to do