What Media Outlets on the Right and Left Are Saying About the Debate

Partisan media outlets have fixated this week on Thursday night’s first presidential debate — and how their preferred candidate could prevail.

Many conservative media outlets have parroted former President Donald J. Trump by questioning the fairness of the debate, which CNN will host, as well as President Biden’s fitness for it. Several publications piled on Mr. Trump’s longstanding criticism that CNN is biased against him. Many also repeated Mr. Trump’s baseless claim that Mr. Biden would be under the influence of performance-enhancing drugs during the event.

Liberal outlets criticized Mr. Trump and his campaign for making the claims about CNN and for the barbs about medication, saying both were lobbed out of desperation. They also suggested the debate could show Americans that Mr. Trump was an erratic candidate.

Here’s how a few of these outlets have covered the lead-up to the debate:

FROM THE RIGHT

Newsmax

Mr. Trump has long criticized CNN for coverage he sees as hostile to him. Those concerns were inflamed on the political right this week when CNN abruptly ended an interview on Monday with a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s campaign after she criticized the network’s commentators.

During the interview, with the CNN host Kasie Hunt, Karoline Leavitt of the Trump campaign accused Jake Tapper, a CNN host who is one of the two moderators of the debate, of being biased against Mr. Trump. She said Mr. Tapper had frequently compared Mr. Trump to Adolf Hitler.