A return to the roots of presidential debates

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CNN —

CNN’s presidential debate will feel like something new for most Americans, but it is actually a return to the roots ofpresidential debates.

Rather than a forum sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which had organized all general election presidential debates since 1988, the meeting Thursday between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will be hosted by CNN but simulcast on some other networks.

CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will moderate the meeting at CNN’s Atlanta studio and, unlike commission debates, there will be no live audience.

That TV studio format is not unlike the first televised presidential debates in 1960 between then-Sen. John F. Kennedy and then-Vice President Richard Nixon. There was a series of four televised debates in September and October of 1960, all of which occurred in TV studios, although one featured Nixon in a Los Angeles studio and Kennedy in New York, according to a history maintained by the commission.

John F. Kennedy, left, speaks during his first presidential debate with Vice President Richard Nixon in 1960. The one-hour debate was moderated by news anchor Howard K. Smith. It started with eight-minute opening statements and then moved on to alternating questions from panelists, seen here in the foreground. Students at the State University of New York at Albany crowd a dormitory lounge to watch a presidential debate between Jimmy Carter and President Gerald Ford in 1976. The Carter-Ford debates were the first since Kennedy-Nixon. Ford watches his wife, Betty, write a note to Carter before their third debate in 1976. In her note,