Donald Trump and Joe Biden will have their first debate of 2024 without a studio audience

CNN will host President Biden and Donald Trump for their first debate of the 2024 campaign (archive).

Atlanta, United States:

There will be no studio audience, depriving candidates of the momentum that comes from gaining supporters. The microphones will be cut off when the candidate’s speaking time is up. Thursday night’s presidential debate will not be normal.

CNN, which hosts President Joe Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump for the first debate of the 2024 campaign in Atlanta, wants to avoid the chaos seen when the two men faced off in 2020.

Here are some facts about the 90-minute debate, a key moment in the race for the White House but whose impact is difficult to predict.

Avoiding chaos

In his first war of words, four years ago, Trump repeatedly interrupted the veteran Democrat, launched into long diatribes and provoked his rival, who ended up shouting at one point: “Will you shut up, man?”

It was not the height of presidential decorum.

To reduce pranks, CNN established a series of rules, which both campaigns agreed to.

Among the most notable: When the candidates take the stage at the network’s Atlanta studios at 9pm (01am GMT Friday), there will be no one in the audience.

Microphones will be muted except for the candidate asked to speak. There will be two commercial breaks during the confrontation between Trump, 78, and Biden, 81, the two oldest candidates for the White House in history.

Moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, both regular CNN hosts, “will use every tool at their disposal to enforce timing and ensure a civil discussion,” the network said.

Trump has the last word

Biden won the coin toss, allowing him to choose his position at the podium or whether he preferred to speak first or second in closing statements.

The incumbent chose the podium to the right of the viewers and Trump chose to have the last word.

No live fact checking

CNN has not revealed the topics of the debate and does not plan to fact-check the candidates’ statements in real time – even if Trump repeats the baseless accusation that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

For Kathleen Hall Jamieson, professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, “one problem with a debate that features Donald Trump is that the moderators don’t check the facts in real time, nor should they.”

“It is highly risky to try to do this and it would be disruptive to the debate if they did,” she told AFP. “The danger is that, rather than informing, a debate could actually increase the amount of inaccurate knowledge.”

Biden and Trump will not have teleprompters and will not be able to take pre-written notes to the stage, although they will be provided with paper and pens. Consultation with the campaign team will not be permitted during commercial breaks.

Debate will air on all networks

Both candidates rejected oversight by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates formed in 1987 to manage such events.

Instead, they made a direct deal with CNN. The news network, now owned by media conglomerate Warner Bros Discovery, provided its rivals with the opportunity to broadcast the debate live in the name of public service under certain conditions.

The screen must contain the CNN logo and outside comments are prohibited.

Fox News — which regularly attacks CNN as biased against Trump — plans to air two hours before the event, with talk show hosts Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity providing pregame briefings.

In the past, Hannity has called Tapper a “radical left partisan talk show host masquerading as a journalist.”

Impact on the campaign?

The debate will certainly be a key moment in the campaign, watched by tens 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 watched a fight between Trump and Biden in 2020.

But it won’t necessarily be a game changer.

This is the first time that a debate has been organized so early in the race, more than four months before election day, and even before the candidates have been formally nominated by their respective parties.

“The concern is that the public in the United States will not pay much attention to the news in the summer,” Jamieson said.

“In general, presidential debates do not affect a sufficient number of votes to decide the outcome of an election. But when an election is close, as this one may be, debates can play an important role.”

ABC is scheduled to host a second debate on September 10.

(Except the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)