CBS throws in the towel before the VP debate even begins
Trump, Vance, and right-wing media have made clear what lie is coming
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.