Question: When did fact–checking become an outrageous abuse of debate moderators’ power?
Answer: When MAGA Republicans decided they didn’t like anyone pointing out that they’re lying.
In a perfect world, it might be enough for political opponents to correct each other’s prevarications and exaggerations. But Donald Trump’s entry into presidential politics, with his incessant flights of fancy and nonstop lying, have completely changed the dynamics. While other presidential candidates have stretched the truth, only one has kidnapped it, bound and gagged it, put it in a barrel and tossed it into the East River.
In the age of Trump, fact-checking has become a necessary service for moderators and other journalists to provide to voters.
Take the first and probably only presidential debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, on Sept. 10.
Some Trumpers went bonkers after ABC News’ David Muir corrected one of the former president’s most egregious and dangerous falsehoods — that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting pets and eating them. Muir noted that Springfield’s city manager said there were no credible claims of pets being “harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”
“But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there,” Trump insisted in the course of a rant that launched a kajillion memes.
There is not a single television interview of any Springfield pet owner claiming their cat or dog was stolen and eaten by immigrants. There was a news story about a woman killing and appearing to eat a cat, but she was born in and lived in Canton, about 175 miles away from Springfield. (She was reportedly charged with “disorderly conduct by reason of intoxication,” among other offenses.)
In any case, Muir didn’t just have a journalistic obligation to call Trump on his race-baiting lie. He had a moral obligation to do so because that kind of incendiary claim can get people killed. Springfield has yet to recover from Trump’s collective character assassination.
In the first and only vice presidential debate last week, Ohio Sen. JD Vance picked up where Trump left off, blaming “illegal” immigrants in places such as Springfield for overwhelming schools and hospitals and driving up the price of real estate. Moderator Margaret Brennan of CBS News correctly noted that the Haitian immigrants Vance was alluding to are, in fact, here legally. Most have what is called temporary protected status, a designation that the Biden administration has expanded.
“Margaret,” Vance complained, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check, and since you’re fact-checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on.”
He went on for a moment, but what’s actually going on is far too complicated for a debate sound bite, and the moderators soon cut both candidates’ microphones, which was allowed by the rules.
Trump supporters blew their lids.
“F you CBS — how DARE YOU,” posted the conservative firebrand Megyn Kelly, who was axed by NBC News in 2018 for suggesting that there was nothing wrong with white people wearing blackface for Halloween. Kelly, who herself famously tangled with Trump as a debate moderator for Fox News, also once insisted that Santa Claus cannot possibly be Black because he “just is white.”
The F-word, by the way, is apparently Kelly’s go-to response in defense of Trump. After the world’s most popular singer endorsed Harris, Kelly responded, “F you, Taylor Swift.” Elegant! I can’t wait to hear what she says about Bruce Springsteen’s recent Harris endorsement.
“‘Fact check’ has become just another word for censorship,” was the headline on a recent New York Post column by Douglas Murray, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.
This makes no sense. Censorship implies suppression of speech before it is aired. In a broadcast debate, a candidate actually has to spout the lie before moderators can correct it.
Murray condemned Muir and fellow moderator Linsey Davis for failing to contradict Harris when she claimed that Project 2025 is “a detailed and dangerous plan … that the former president intends on implementing if he were elected again.”
“They must have known that the big Democratic boogey man ‘Project 2025’ has nothing to do with Donald Trump or his campaign,” Murray wrote, presumably with a straight face.
This is such bald-faced lie that I would be remiss if I did not fact-check Murray myself.
Project 2025 is a 900-page blueprint for a second Trump administration by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. At least 140 former members of Trump’s first administration are involved, CNN has reported, including six former Cabinet secretaries. It calls for, among other things, abolishing the Department of Education and Head Start, ending efforts to combat climate change, undermining the independence of the Justice Department, effectively enacting a nationwide abortion ban, and dismantling what MAGA Republicans call “the deep state,” known to those in the reality-based community as “government.”
A recent analysis by the nonpartisan Brookings Institution said that parts of Project 2025 “are more closely aligned with a white Christian nationalist worldview than a traditional, conservative education policy agenda.”
Once Project 2025’s radical plan to overhaul the executive branch became widely known and the public reacted negatively, Trump pretended as if he’d never heard of it. And the conservative, Trump-promoting New York Post would very much like you to believe that untruth.
As it happens, most Americans think debate moderators should fact-check. According to a June survey by Boston University’s College of Communication (my graduate school alma mater), more than two of every three Americans surveyed said “moderators should point out factual inaccuracies” in candidates’ statements during debates.
The survey did find a partisan discrepancy: While 81% of Democrats supported fact-checking in real time, 67% of Republicans did.
Gee, why do you suppose that is?