ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis received plaudits from their peers for their efforts moderating the debate earlier this month b
Matt Gertz at MMFA:
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.
[...]
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.
Sounds like CBS moderators are caving into the right-wing bullying campaign against fact-checking lies being told at the debate stage, particularly from JD Vance.
