“CBS News says it will be up to Vance and Walz to fact-check each other in veep debate.”

AP, 9/27/24      

I have two reactions to the news that CBS has decided not to fact-check JD Vance and Tim Walz during Tuesday evening’s vice presidential debate:

First, if this is true, this is an act of cowardice and a degradation (again) of journalism.

Second, I don’t believe it. (Or maybe I don’t want to believe it.)

I have previously written about debates and what I now call “The Moderator Imperative.” That we are still, ahem, debating this is a testament to how some in the media are cowed by Donald Trump and his enablers constantly hectoring the mainstream media and by a failure to understand our duty to point out a difference in degrees.

Journalists moderating a debate should not simply ask questions and then be relegated to timekeepers. This would seem to be an obvious point, but that job could be done by a primitive computer, much less an AI-guided one. (I have many times expressed my opposition to specific time restraints — 1-minute answers and 30-second rebuttals, for example — because moderators should be empowered to guide the debate, cutting off participants when they stray far afield from the question, asking them to amplify talking points.)

Moderators — and I have been one dozens of times — should try to stay out of the way and let a conversation occur. But politicians being politicians, they will spin, they will distort, they will lie. To suggest that when this happens that journalists should simply be rendered mute shows how far we have fallen from the days of Cronkite, Murrow, Huntley and Brinkley.

Our job is to make sure these events are as illuminating about the candidates as they can be, whether it reveals a lack of policy knowledge or lack of consistency or lack of character. If we demand that they be fact-checkers of the other, they are likely to make things worse by … spinning, distorting and, yes, lying.

That’s why preparation by moderators is essential — they must know the subject matter of their questions as well as the person they are asking. That way they can challenge anything out of line, showing the audience what is fact and fiction.

Many believe that Donald Trump should not change this calculus — that the job is the job. This is both unquestionably true and undoubtedly false. Let me explain:

Our job as fact-checkers should not change because of Trump’s serial mendacity. It remains The Moderator Imperative. But because Trump creates a virtual reality and then believes (or seems to believe) it is reality and because he tells lies with a velocity and volume heretofore unrecorded, we have to adjust.

We must adjust. We can’t just pretend he is the same.

There is a palpable difference between a politician trying to evade being pinned down or explaining flip-flops and a fabulist lying like most of us draw breath. So when I see ABC presidential debate moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis criticized for fact-checking Trump more than Harris, I am sympathetic. As I have said, I think they missed a couple of opportunities to stop Harris and make her answer certain questions. But it is hard in the heat of a live debate to keep track of all of Trump’s falsehoods, and his lies are always so much more obvious or insidious, whether it’s about election denialism or undocumented immigrants.

If we treat these things as the same as Harris not taking positions on issues or changing past stances out of electoral convenience, then we are conflating typical political behavior with dangerous and demonstrable lunacy. We should not.

And, frankly, I don’t believe CBS moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan will sit idly by when Vance and Walz debate. The vice presidential contenders are not the same as Trump and Harris, but there are some similarities, especially because Vance has all but acknowledged he makes up stories (cats and dogs being eaten by Haitians in Springfield) to help Trump.

It's disheartening to see Republicans who fancy themselves as patriots trying to defend any of this. Some Republicans of the Hugh Hewitt/Lindsey Graham ilk know what Trump is but have bent the knee because they are more interested in their own careers than the country, more consumed by their hatred of the left and so convinced of Harris’ vacuousness that they justify ignoring or downplaying Trump’s abhorrent behavior.

So be it. Let them eat their own words.

Journalism’s job is not to be cowed by the criticism or this challenge; it is to rise to the occasion and block out the noise. If we do not, if we allow Trump and his minions to change what we know we must do, history will not be kind.

Jon Ralston is CEO/Editor of The Indy.