Moderators Should Moderate, Not Fact Check
A few weeks back, NBC’s Matt Lauer came under a mass of criticism for not pushing back on Donald Trump during recent interviews. Trump, as he typically does, was saying absurdly incorrect things, and Lauer, who served as the moderator for the first presidential forum featuring both the GOP and Democratic nominees, let him speak his peace. The criticism flew fast and furious. Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine called it “pathetic.” Fortune said it was a journalistic failure. Lauer, the critics claimed, should have corrected Trump’s incorrect statements.
Chris Wallace of Fox News also came under assault after he announced that he would not serve as a fact-checker in the last Presidential debate, which he is going to be moderating. While some on the left blew a gasket over his announced intention, Wallace did get some support from fellow cable news star Joe Scarborough of MSNBC, who agreed that Wallace shouldn’t be checking facts. Trump himself has argued that moderators shouldn’t fact-check, and for the first time in a long time, I have to agree with him.
This presidential election has been marred by some of the grossest examples of misstatements, blatant untruths, and flat out old-fashioned lying that the country has ever seen at this level of politics. It has happened on both sides of the aisle – neither Trump nor Clinton can claim that they have been paragons of virtue in the honesty department. And that has put more pressure on news organizations who have the most contact with the candidates to hold these candidates accountable when they say things that are demonstrably untrue. In the internet era, where every speech is catalogued and easily searchable, every appearance recorded and saved for posterity, it is easier now than ever before to hold politicians accountable for fudging the facts or changing their tune to fit an audience. That’s just good journalism.
But that’s not what debates are all about. Wallace and Scarborough are correct – it is not the role of the moderator at a Presidential debate to check the facts of the candidates or insert themselves into the debate. Debates between the candidates are just that – debates between the candidates.
The last two presidential cycles have seen a strange morphing of the role of a moderator away from the traditional role – to ask questions and allow the candidates to answer – and into more of the role of a prosecutor. The party debates were a perfect example of that, and Wallace was one of the biggest offenders. Because there were so many candidates, the primary debates weren’t debates at all – they were more like mini-press conferences, with journalists asking unique questions and going back and forth with the candidates instead of letting the candidates go back and forth with each other. Here’s Chris Wallace doing it to Trump earlier this year.
That was typical of the exchanges during the primary debates. And while it may have made for good television, it wasn’t what political debates are and have been about. Much of this, in my opinion, stems from Candy Crowley’s attempt to fact-check Mitt Romney during the 2012 Presidential Debates. Remember this?
The President hopped on Crowley’s statement here because it was so unprecedented – that the moderator would openly contradict what one of the candidates was saying in a forum to essentially defend the other candidate’s position. And Crowley was roundly cheered by the left and criticized by the right for what she did. Compared to what we’ve seen from journalists serving as moderators this cycle, Crowley’s fact-check was relatively tame. But it set a bad precedent.
The presidential debates are supposed to be just that – debates. Debates are a hallowed tradition in American politics, but they haven’t always been the staple of presidential cycles that they are today. The Lincoln/Douglas debates during the 1858 Senate campaign became the gold standard by which political debates in America were held for decades, and they were held without a moderator. The first presidential debates were held in 1960 between Nixon and Kennedy, and featured Howard K. Smith as the moderator along with a panel of journalists to ask questions. You can watch some of the debate here.
You’ll notice that the Smith says almost nothing, beyond serving as an announcer to keep the debate moving smoothly and explaining to the audience what is going to happen. Even the panel of journalists here, who ask tough questions (I love the first one Sander Vanocur asks Nixon), don’t do much following-up on the answers nor do they challenge Nixon or Kennedy when they answer.
After Nixon/Kennedy, there were no televised presidential debates again until the Ford/Carter debates in 1976. Throughout the next cycles with debates, whether they were hosted by the League of Women Voters or the Commission on Presidential debates, the role of moderator was almost exclusively that of being a referee, not a fact checker.
Looking over the transcripts of some of these old debates, it’s striking how little the moderators actually did. Bill Moyers, who criticized Wallace as linked above, said almost nothing of substance when he moderated a debate between then Governor Reagan and Congressman John Anderson in the 1980 GOP primary.
Unfortunately, we let the primary inject some very bad behavior into the debate process. The presidential primary debates, because of the number of candidates, became a free-for-all press conference writ-large, not a debate. They were so bad that some have begun arguing against having moderators at all. We don’t need to get rid of moderators, though – we just need to remember what debates are and what they aren’t.
Debates aren’t quiz shows. They’re a chance for two candidates to face each other and argue. That being the case, moderators are akin to umpires, at a ballgame. They keep the teams from fighting with each other, and they decide who has broken the rules. If a candidate tells a lie, that’s not breaking a rule. If they try to filibuster an answer, that’s breaking a rule. The questions being asked often don’t have correct answers – they’re more about policy and where the candidates stand on the issues. That’s why we have journalists asking these questions, not Alex Trebek or Wink Martindale. If a candidate says something that isn’t true, it’s up to their opponent on the stage – not the one behind the desk – to challenge their statement. It’s tempting to want some neutral third party to step in and stick it to someone who is clearly lying, but that’s not their role. If Trump lies, it has to be up to Hillary to call him on it, and vice versa.
Moderators moderate. They don’t fact-check. We shouldn’t expect them to.
Or, to put it in baseball parlance – “let the kids play, blue.”
