Debate Sans Fact-Check?
Terry H. Schwadron
June 27, 2024
Amid all the hoopla surrounding tonight’s presidential debate, complete with the CNN moderators’ power to shut off microphones if either Donald Trump or Joe Biden does not follow its rules, one decision stands out.
By pre-agreement, the moderators will not provide instant fact-checks.
So even if Trump suggests that Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot was a tourist rally gone wrong or if Biden insists that there is no chaos at the southern border, neither Jake Tapper nor Dana Bash, the designated CNN moderators, apparently is going to dispute the truth of such an utterance.
Over the weekend, David Chalian, CNN’s political director, told The New York Times that the debate “is not the ideal arena for live fact-checking.” Instead, the moderators would focus on “facilitating the debate between these candidates, not being a participant in that debate.”
Fact-checking would come after the telecast, obviously to a much smaller audience.
Something seems off about this decision.
As David Froomkin at PressWatchers.org, notes, “ By declaring ahead of time that there will little or no live fact-checking, CNN is telling its world audience that it doesn’t give a damn about the difference — and that whether someone lies or not is irrelevant to whether they should be president.”
Froomkin, a liberal columnist, sees advantage for Trump as “ an irrational, compulsive liar.” If right-leaning columnists argued for “fact-checks,” they would see the opposite, of course, but, as a rule, they avoid fact-checking unless it involves very selective facts.
Informing the Public
This debate has become CNN’s to run and operate because the candidates turned away from any independent debate commission.
Like other competing networks, CNN saw the chance for good public image, a captive audience, and television profits in sponsoring the debate.
Amid all the exploratory articles about candidate strategies and goals in the debate and the now-standard attempts to spin the outcomes of what either will be exchanges of opposite policies or a mere stare-down between competing, if too-familiar visages, there seems to have been little discussion about what to ask the candidates.
As Foomkin argues, news organizations are supposed to help inform the public, or in this case, at least to provide a decorous forum in which we try to discern the real differences between the two major candidates. What is unaddressed is what role Truth should play in the assertions by either candidate in pursuit of selling themselves.
It does seem on its face that letting Trump know that once again there will be no public, televised accountability for making things up, for stretching opinions about the state of our country into measurable lies, CNN is not fulfilling its proper role. CNN will be turning Biden into a fact-checker or into a goalie who lets some of the shots go unanswered.
It was CNN that hosted Trump earlier for a public “town hall” event. Trump lied repeatedly during the live telecast and insulted CNN host Kaitlin Collins. Later, she and CNN took hits from the rest of the news industry for not challenging some of the more outrageous statements made that night. Trump lies regularly to right-leaning news outlets as well, but no one even considers challenging him, for fear of looking less than loyal.
Why Isn’t Truth a Goal?
The problem with instant fact-check is that it makes the journalist appear as an agent for the opponent — a situation I faced many times as a reporter. Truth, at least policy truth of the sort that are measurable in health, crime, immigration, national security issues, ought to be able to be heard without partisan association.
Why do we have so much appetite to let candidates talk without putting their words next to the deeds they reflect?
How difficult would it have been for CNN to set up a fact-checking desk for tonight’s debate. As someone who has worked in three newsrooms, I can guarantee that the news organizations for whom I worked will be doing so — and those results will be distributed online within moments of being spoken on air.
Trump’s entire campaign is a re-run of 2020, in which he asserts without evidence, that the election was stolen by Biden and Democrats. Are the two hosts supposed to sit on their hands and not notice when Trump repeats those assertions tonight?
When Biden says the economy is great, will anyone challenge the finding with reference to supermarket prices? Or ask Trump how imposing tariffs on every imported good for sale in the United States won’t raise prices further? Will the hosts simply allow Trump to insist that Biden wants to raise all taxes when he has specifically and repeatedly excused households making under $400,000 a year?
The biggest problem with the debate is the number of voting Americans who think it will be irrelevant to decision-making. Allowing the candidates to make up the facts on the fly simply adds to the distrust of all involved.
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