Democratic Debate Moderator, Abby Phillip, Under Attack for Asking the Hard Questions

It’s shocking. Can you believe that a Black woman in a position of power is under attack?

Sadly, this twist in the tale of an influential sister is expected. Calls for candidate questioners to represent the electorate – especially Black women as the most reliable, most Democratic voters – were asked and answered. For more, read WANTED: A Black woman on the Presidential Debate Stage.

Let’s be clear: Abby Phillip wearing her moderator cape was a bias buster. Her position of power lasted 120 minutes, the length of the Jan. 14th presidential debate. These 7,200 seconds on the seventh stage in Iowa were moments with the Sword of Damocles above the head of this CNN reporter.

Phillip still brought up the tough questions. To Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, she asked: “What do you say to people who say that a woman can’t win this election?” Apparently, ‘these people’ do not remember that Senator Hillary Clinton received almost THREE million more votes than President Donald Trump.

Later Phillip grilled former Mayor Pete Buttigieg:

PHILLIP: A key part of your mission in this primary is going to be to prove to Democratic voters that you’re strong enough to take on Donald Trump. Each of you face unique challenges in doing that.

Mayor Buttigieg, you say you’ve had trouble earning the support of black voters because you’re unknown. But you’ve been campaigning for a year now and polling shows you with next to no black support, support that you’ll need in order to beat Donald Trump. Is it possible that black voters have gotten to know you and have simply decided to choose another candidate?

For those two questions alone, the sisterhood needs to get out the pom poms! Just imagine how a series of these kind of challenging questions would have changed the narrative in the 2016 election cycle.

Before Tuesday, it was not easy to find information about Abby Phillip, who prior to CNN worked at Politico, The Washington Post and ABC News. Even in an article about the moderators, a Newsweek reporter spared a paragraph on the Harvard grad, compared to three for CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Des Moines Register journalist Brianne Pfannenstiel.

That was then. Now here comes the tar and feathers. Check out #CNNisTrash. It was trending on Twitter, so even crazier headlines followed. CNN moderator criticized for question to Sanders in The Hill or CNN’s Abby Phillip to Bernie Sanders: We don’t believe you in the Washington Post are good examples. (Remember that the Pew Research Center studied 1.2 million tweets with URLs and found that two-thirds of links on Twitter were shared from suspected bots, not people.)

Phillip raised another topic that dominated the news cycle in the run up to the debate in Des Moines. It was an anticipated subject, admittedly a minor one if anyone is ranking gender bias and name calling. Many other journalists covered the rising tension between the friends and most liberal presidential candidates, Vermont Independent Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Warren.

On stage, Phillip became the first journalist to confront both bickering candidates, a move that many other reporter would have made.

PHILLIP: Let’s now turn to — let’s now turn to an issue that’s come up in the last 48 hours. Sen. Sanders, CNN reported yesterday that — and Sen. Sanders, Sen. Warren confirmed in a statement, that in 2018 you told her that you did not believe that a woman could win the election. Why did you say that? 

SANDERS: Well, as a matter of fact, I didn’t say it…

PHILLIP: So Sen. Sanders — Sen. Sanders, I do want to be clear here, you’re saying that you never told Sen. Warren that a woman could not win the election?

SANDERS: That is correct. 

PHILLIP: Sen. Warren, what did you think when Sen. Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?

According to the Twitterverse in a trend that sounds suspiciously like a bunch of Bernie bros, that last question was Phillip’s “big” mistake. TheWashington Post headline and another in the Intercept imply the moderator assumed that the Vermont Senator was lying about his conversation with Warren, rather than she believed her CNN colleague’s reporting. The Intercept even called CNN an opponent of Sanders in the headline.

The not-so-friendly exchange between the Senators at the end of the debate did not silence matters. A hot mic recording, released by CNN, captured Warren accusing Sanders of calling her “a liar on national TV.” He responded, “Let’s not do it right now.”

The debate over Phillip’s words sure buried #DebateSoWhite.