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There’s been a growing discussion — I’d say controversy — over whether the presidential debate moderators should fact-check the candidates live.
The issue has been brewing for a few days, but then came to a head yesterday when the head of the presidential commission on debates gave CNN’s Brian Stelter a rather odd reason for why the debates shouldn’t be fact-checked: Because how do you decide between “big facts” and “little facts”?
As absurd as her comments sound, and are, I think her general point is that the moderator’s judgment isn’t perfect, and thus they could wrongly influence the debate. And she’s not wrong. But the same applies to any journalist — they need to get the story right, and sometimes they won’t. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try.
But there’s a bigger problem here. In a high school or college debate, the judge — the moderator — decides who wins. In a presidential debate, it’s the people. But the people aren’t always sufficiently informed to know who’s lying. And while the Trump camp wants Hillary herself to fact-check Trump during the debate, why should the public believe her? Candidates always claim that their rival is lying. Trump even lies about indisputable facts, such as whether he supported the Iraq war before we went in (he did, there’s tape). So leaving it to the other candidate to call out a lie means leaving the public confused about the truth.
That’s why some sort of fact-checking needs to take place with the debate monitor. And it’s not as though this hasn’t happened before. One of the most famous examples of calling a candidate out live on his mistake was Gerald Ford in 1976, when he claimed that there was no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Of course, in Ford’s case, every single person watching knew the truth. So this was more an issue of a moderator spotting a gaffe and bringing it to the public’s attention, lest they miss it.
What do you think? What should the role of the moderator?
Here’s my Periscope discussion on this topic:
PS Candy Crowley was right.
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