Tom Shales, Washington Post: In Pa. Debate, The Clear Loser Is ABC. For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with.
Just when you thought traditional media couldn’t demean itself more, ABC’s tag-team does it. A dismal performance.