David Muir may already be paying the price for his role in last week’s presidential debate, as viewers for ABC’s “World News Tonight,” the evening news program he anchors, have dropped double digits. The ratings report puts more pressure on ABC News and ABC’s parent, The Walt Disney Company, after Mr. Muir and his co-moderator, Linsey Davis, were widely criticized for exhibiting anti-Trump bias.  

Mr. Muir must be pondering if he’ll suffer the fate of his arch-rival, NBC’s Lester Holt, whose ratings took a permanent blow after he was similarly assailed for his moderation of a Trump debate in 2016.

“World News Tonight” saw a 12 percent drop in viewership in the days following last Tuesday’s debate according to weekly Nielsen ratings data viewed by Fox News. While his show was averaging 7.6 million viewers in the lead up to the debate, his average viewership on the following Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday dropped to 6.7 million. 

Meanwhile, the competing evening news broadcasts, the “CBS Evening News” and “NBC Nightly News,” hosted by Mr. Holt, saw only slight declines in average viewership in the days following the debate, Fox News Digital reports. Though even with the significant viewership hit, Mr. Muir’s newscast — which is often the most viewed show in all of television on football-free days — remained the most widely watched evening newscast. 

Mr. Muir’s supporters have sought to attribute the ratings drop to a two-week blackout of Disney-owned programming on DirectTV because of a carriage dispute during the first two weeks of September. Yet Fox News points out that “World News Tonight” episodes that aired prior to the debate were down only 8 percent from the program’s year-to-date totals compared to a 12 percent drop post debate.

Mr. Muir’s post-debate viewership loss is reminiscent of the fall in popularity of Mr. Holt, whose reputation as a non-partisan newsman was called into question after he moderated the 2016 debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton. Mr. Holt raised eyebrows when he forcefully fact-checked Trump about New York City’s controversial “stop and frisk” policy during the debate. The damage got even worse after Mr. Holt took heat for hounding the 45th president about Russia during a much-watched sit-down interview in 2017. 

By spring of 2018, Mr. Holt’s “Nightly News” — which had long held the cherished crown of the most highly viewed evening news show — dropped behind “World News Tonight” after a key demographic of viewers aged 25 to 54 abandoned Mr. Holt in droves. The show was never able to recover from its viewership loss, a source of deep embarrassment to NBCUniversal. which had long been able to boast that it had all the top rated news shows. NBC’s top broadcast news shows — “Today,” “Nightly News,” and “Meet the Press” — all now trail their counterparts at ABC as NBC News has increasingly struggled to distinguish itself from its far-left cable sister, MSNBC, and alienated politically moderate viewers. 

Back uptown at ABC News’s soon-to-be-former headquarters on Manhattan’s Upper West Side — Disney is relocating ABC News to smaller quarters downtown after years of cutbacks to its once-mighty news division — Mr. Muir, as well as his fellow ABC debate host Linsey Davis, are currently facing mounting scrutiny for their conduct as moderators during last Tuesday’s 90-minute debate at Philadelphia. 

Accusations of bias have centered around their aggressive fact-checking of President Trump throughout the debate while neglecting to correct Vice President Harris once, repeatedly directing the conversation to topics of strength for Ms. Harris, like abortion, and pressing Trump about the events of January 6. 

Senator Cotton slammed the network for “allowing Kamala Harris to say ‘no U.S. troops are in combat zones’ without any pushback or fact-checking,” calling it “outrageous”. 

“This goes beyond bias,” he wrote on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twutter. “It’s a media company effectively joining the Harris campaign.”

Scores of conservative journalists and politicians — as well as Trump himself — expressed similar criticism post-debate, accusing the moderators of facilitating a “three-on-one” attack. 

“It was a rigged deal, as I assumed it would be, because when you looked at the fact that they were correcting everything and not correcting with her,” Trump said during a conversation with Fox on the Wednesday following the debate. 

The criticism intensified this week after an anonymous X handle released the first few pages of an affidavit, purportedly from a “whistleblower” inside ABC News, alleging that the network colluded with the Harris campaign to disadvantage President Trump during the debate. 

Its author — who claims to have worked in various “technical and administrative positions” at ABC News over the past ten years — accused the network of negotiating with the Harris campaign to secure the vice president a slew of advantages both ahead of and during the debate, including receiving a list of sample questions beforehand, and barring the monitors from asking questions on specifically requested subjects. 

The purported whistleblower also alleged that the vice president arranged with ABC News for accommodations to make her appear more visually favorable throughout the debate, including receiving a smaller podium than Trump — who is nearly an entire foot taller than she is — and ensuring that her split-screen television views were “favorable” to Trump’s.

Screenshots of the affidavit, which is dated for September 9, the day before the debate, surfaced on social media over the weekend. The mysterious X handle promoting the affidavit promised in X postings to formally file the affidavit with the courts (that has yet to transpire).

The affidavit even secured the backing of billionaire hedge fund mogul, Bill Ackman, who penned a letter to the chief executive of Disney, Bob Iger, urging him to launch an investigation into the claims, which he called “credible as written.” 

“While I can’t determine the veracity of the allegations, they do match substantively what took place during the debate. The moderators of the debate — @DavidMuir and @LinseyDavis — have yet to respond to the allegations. Since they have not yet done so, one must draw a negative inference,” Mr. Ackman wrote on X on Sunday.  

He continued: “In light of the seriousness of the allegations and the implications for this presidential election and for ABC’s reputation and thereby @Disney’s and the office of the CEO, I strongly encourage you to launch an immediate investigation of this matter.”

Mr. Ackman is just one of the influential figures who has elevated the whistleblower’s claims. Dozens of journalists, political commentators, and politicians have shared the affidavit on social media and demanded action.

Both Mr. Muir and Ms. Davis have yet to respond directly to the affidavit. However, last week, Ms. Davis told Los Angeles Times that the decision to fact-check Trump was driven by what she and her colleagues at ABC thought was the failure of the moderators of June’s CNN debate, between Trump and President Biden, to call out Trump on his falsehoods.

Then, on Tuesday, Mr. Muir went downstairs to appear on a sister ABC show, “Live with Kelly and Mark”, where he declared that the post-debate chatter was “just noise” and that he felt it was the moderators’ “duty” to bring up the issues that Americans care most about. “All of the noise that you hear afterward about you know, ‘Which candidate won the debate, did the moderators win or lose?’ That’s just noise,” he said. “You all know that. The most important thing to remember is you all have the power.”

ABC News addressed the allegations on Tuesday, stating that: “ABC News followed the debate rules that both campaigns agreed on and which clearly state: No topics or questions will be shared in advance with campaigns or candidates.”

However, Mr. Ackman expressed his dissatisfaction with the statement, likening it to the “carefully written press release” issued by companies his activist hedge fund had shorted “to misdirect shareholders in response to the issues we had identified.” 

“Not surprisingly,” he added, “there has been no denial from the two ABC moderators. Just silence.”

The Pershing Square Capital Management founder, who recently played a key role in the ouster of Harvard’s president over her response to anti-Israel protests, then pledged to “alert the @SEC directly about @Disney, @ABC and their misleading response to the whistleblower’s accusations about the presidential debate.”