#LetYangSpeak: Andrew Yang accuses NBC of cutting off his mic
White House hopeful Andrew Yang was largely a nonfactor at Thursday’s presidential debate, but the political novice afterward blamed his scant airtime on technical difficulties.
Speaking to supporters following the debate, the Silicon Valley businessman leveled an accusation that the debate’s producers had cut off his mic when he wasn’t speaking, thus robbing him of the chance to interject as other candidates continuously did throughout the night.
“There were also a few times, FYI, where I just started talking, being like, ‘Hey, I’d like to add something there,’ and my mic was not on,” Yang told his fans. “It’s not like if you start talking it all of a sudden takes over the convo. It’s like I was talking and nothing was happening.”
He echoed that sentiment in a string of tweets Friday, writing that “I feel bad for those who tuned in to see and support me that I didn’t get more airtime. Will do better (my mic being off unless called on didn’t help) and glad to have another opportunity in July (and afterwards)!”
But the network pushed back on Yang Friday, denying his accusation. "At no point during the debate was any candidate's microphone turned off or muted," said communications director Richard Hudock.
Yang spoke for around three minutes the entire night, the least of any of the 20 candidates on stage throughout both nights of the first round of Democratic debates.
At the top of the debate Thursday, moderator Lester Holt alluded to the challenges the size of the field held in terms of speaking time, telling the candidates that "because of the large field of candidates, not every person is going to be able to weigh in on every topic but over the course of the next two hours, we will hear from everyone."
Even as Yang chalked up his lackluster showing to the “media marginalization of the Andrew Yang narrative,” he allowed that he was unaccustomed to the debate format and acknowledged that there was a learning curve. The debate, he said, “requires very specific behaviors that feel very forced.” As an example, he offered, “you have to fake and force things even more than I’d anticipated.”
The tech entrepreneur also had little praise for NBC’s hosting job.
“The moderators have a fair amount of power and authority, including, someone in production is turning on a mic or not,” Yang told his fans Thursday. “I quite literally felt somewhat, like, mechanically restricted.”
On Twitter, he added that “I’m glad that the network switches and we get different moderators each time."
There did appear to be some sort of audio issues on both debate nights — there was a four-minute delay on Night One when the network switched moderators partway through and didn’t turn off the mics of the previous moderators who were off screen. On Night Two, multiple candidates appeared to strain to hear questions that were being asked of them.
Yang's small but dedicated following helped him easily clear the polling and grassroots donor thresholds required to make it on to the debate stage, but he was largely absent from Thursday's conversation, being asked only one or two questions all night.
He also said Friday his campaign was only 2,000 donors away from clearing the 130,000-donor threshold for the third Democratic debate, having already made it on stage for the second round of debates next month.
Yang's supporters responded to his accusations with force, driving the hashtag #LetYangSpeak atop Twitter's trending topics in the U.S.
