A consensus formed during and after Tuesday's presidential debate that the ABC News moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, were overtly biased against former President Donald Trump and displayed extreme favoritism toward Vice President Kamala Harris.

That shouldn't have been surprising to anybody, as just prior to the debate a study was released that exposed Muir's lopsided coverage of the two candidates on his "World News Tonight" program, according to Fox News.

The study revealed that Muir provided Harris with exclusively positive coverage on the show while simultaneously giving Trump almost entirely negative coverage.

Overtly biased coverage of Harris and Trump

According to NewsBusters, the Media Research Center observed 100 presidential campaign stories that aired on "World News Tonight," of which Muir is the managing editor and weeknight anchor, from July 21, when VP Harris entered the race, until September 6.

The MRC found that Harris received 100% positive coverage with at least 25 overtly positive statements from anchors, reporters, voters, and non-partisan guests, but no single negative statement was uttered about her by any of them.

Conversely, the researchers found that the ABC News program was 93% negative toward former President Trump with just 5 positive statements compared to 66 negative ones from the same cohort.

NewsBusters noted that as part of the review, the MRC weeds out statements from obviously partisan guests and legitimate "horse race" reporting about polls and measurable electoral prospects.

It was also noted that the equivalent nightly news programs on CBS and NBC were also slanted in their coverage of Harris and Trump, albeit not to the same extent as ABC. In fact, "CBS Evening News" was 94% positive toward Harris and 77% negative toward Trump while "NBC Nightly News" was 71% positive about Harris and 86% negative about Trump.

Fact-checking of Trump -- but not Harris -- was deliberate

As for Tuesday's debate, one of the biggest complaints from viewers was how the ABC moderators repeatedly -- and at times falsely -- "fact-checked" former President Trump and badgered him to directly answer their questions, yet, at the same time, they never once fact-checked VP Harris or called her out for dodging their questions.

Per a separate Fox News report, Linsey Davis admitted in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that the fact-checking of Trump was deliberate and in response to critiques from Democrats that CNN had not sufficiently fact-checked the former president in real-time during the first debate in June against President Joe Biden.

"People were concerned that statements were allowed to just hang and not [be] disputed by the candidate Biden, at the time, or the moderators," Davis told the newspaper.

Trump said ABC's broadcast license should be revoked

Of course, former President Trump was less than pleased with how the debate was handled by the moderators, according to USA Today, as he told "Fox & Friends" on Wednesday that the previous night's event was an "unfair debate" and "a rigged deal" in which it was "three on one," with the two ABC moderators joining VP Harris to gang up on him.

He further complained that ABC had been "dishonest" about how the debate would proceed and said of the network, "To be honest they are a news organization, they have to be licensed. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that."

To be sure, this is far from the first time that Trump has called for broadcast licenses to be revoked from the "fake news" networks he has perpetually battled against for nearly a decade now, and while that sentiment is certainly understandable, it is also highly unlikely to ever occur and, more likely than not, has fueled the combative nature of his relationship with the media.