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Molly Butler / Media Matters

CBS throws in the towel before the VP debate even begins

Trump, Vance, and right-wing media have made clear what lie is coming

Written by Matt Gertz

Published

ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis received plaudits from their peers for their efforts moderating the debate earlier this month between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Many journalists praised ABC’s decision to forcefully rebut a tiny fraction of Trump's false claims, which provided “a model… for real-time fact-checking of the candidates that we have not glimpsed in previous debates,” as New York Times reporter Michael M. Grynbaum put it.

But CBS News has decided that moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan will not follow that model for Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate between Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. The network said that “the onus will be on Vance and Walz to point out misstatements by the other, and that ‘the moderators will facilitate those opportunities’ during rebuttal time,” The Associated Press reported Friday. 

In other words, if a candidate offers an obvious and easily debunked falsehood, the moderators will presumably turn to their opponent and say some version of, “Your response?” This amounts to “basically off-loading one of your journalistic responsibilities onto the candidates themselves,” as a critic put it to the AP.

The CBS decision to renounce moderator fact checks will leave the national debate audience all the poorer. For instance, it will turn an inevitable and easily anticipated lie from Vance that Harris allowed thousands of migrant murderers to run rampant into a he-said/he-said conflict. And the plausible explanations for why CBS is telegraphing its unwillingness to do so bode ill for the state of the news media.

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  • The Trump campaign’s lies are predictable. Here’s what is on tap for tomorrow night.

    Journalists are well-aware of Trump’s penchant for making dishonest claims, and Vance is following in his footsteps. Earlier this month, Vance accelerated a deranged right-wing media lie that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, even though his own staff had confirmed with Springfield’s city manager that the claim was “baseless.”

    But when Trump tried to push the lie by ranting about immigrants “eating the pets of the people that live there” during the presidential debate, Muir responded that ABC News had reached out to the city manager and confirmed there were “no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed” by immigrants. 

    Trump’s lie about Haitians was predictable enough that ABC’s moderators were prepared for it, ensuring that people watching the debate had clarity over the accuracy of a particularly unhinged claim.

    Now the Trump campaign is highlighting a new and similarly false claim about immigrants, just in time for Vance’s debate performance. Over the weekend, Trump and Vance repeatedly lifted up a bogus Fox News talking point that the former president said proved that “13,000 convicted murderers entered our Country” during the Biden-Harris administration and that Harris “allowed” them to “roam free to KILL AGAIN.” 

    Fox and Trump were responding to a letter that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement provided to a Republican congressman stating that “the agency’s non-detained docket” includes 435,719 convicted criminals, including 13,099 convicted of homicide. But Trump’s interpretation of those numbers is totally false, as CNN’s Daniel Dale pointed out:

    Facts First: Trump’s claims are false in two big ways. First, the statistics he was referring to are not specifically about people who entered the country during the Biden-Harris administration. Rather, those statistics are about noncitizens who entered the country under any administration, including Trump’s; were convicted of a crime at some point, usually in the US after their arrival; and are now living in the US while being listed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “non-detained docket” — where some have been listed for years, including while Trump was president, because their country of citizenship won’t let the US deport them back there. Second, that ICE “non-detained” list includes people who are still serving jail and prison sentences for their crimes; they are on the list because they are not being held in immigration detention in particular.

    Since Vance has publicly touted his willingness to say dishonest things about immigrants in order to drive media attention to the issue, he seems likely to push a version of Trump’s lie on Tuesday night.

    CBS could be prepared for that lie and rebut Vance. But the network is telegraphing that the moderators, instead of saying that a false statement is false, will instead throw it to Walz for a rebuttal. Viewers will be left choosing their own adventure over which candidate is telling the truth.

  • Why is CBS doing this?

    There are two explanations for why CBS has decided not to follow ABC’s model and have its moderators fact-check the debate, and both are dispiriting.

    One is that CBS simply does not believe it is the network’s job to separate truth from fiction during high-profile, heavily viewed political events. Under this interpretation, while ABC News showed that such fact-checking can be done well, and that it adds to the debate rather than subtracts from it, CBS is simply opposed to doing that.

    The other is that CBS has been scared off of fact-checking by the right’s furious response to ABC. Right-wing pundits melted down in real time, castigating the ABC moderators and denouncing their network. And Trump himself repeatedly lashed out at the network in the days following the debate, even threatening to use federal regulatory power to retaliate against it.

    By contrast, Trump praised the CNN moderators, who had adopted a far more passive style, following his June debate with President Joe Biden.

    Perhaps CBS brass have decided they’d rather not risk angering Trump and have him take a hammer to the network if he returns to the White House, or perhaps they simply want to avoid the hassle that comes with such complaints. Either way, it means authoritarian threats have proved effective in compelling the media to change behavior. That is a dire incentive structure for the press.