Media critics have accused them of cowing to MAGA Republicans.

by Julianne McShane
News & Engagement Writer

    At Tuesday’s vice presidential debate between Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), something will be missing: on-air fact-checking.

The Associated Press reports that moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan of CBS will not point out the candidates’ inaccuracies during the 90-minute debate, scheduled to take place in New York City at 9 p.m. Eastern. Instead, the network says the candidates can fact-check each other and that its misinformation unit, consisting of about 20 people, will provide real-time fact-checking during the debate in an online live blog and on-air afterwards.

The network’s plan garnered extensive, immediate criticism from reporters and press watchers alike. Some journalists accused CBS of failing to live up to its mission, while others charged that they were bowing to Trump’s camp, which attacked ABC News moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir for pointing out Trump’s many lies in his debate earlier this month against Kamala Harris. Trump falsely claimed, for example, that Democrats execute babies after they’re born and that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating peoples’ house pets. Following the debate, CNN reported that Harris lied once, about the historical significance of the unemployment rate under Trump, while Trump lied more than 30 times.

There are a few questions to consider before judging the significance of CBS’s move: Can on-air, live fact-checking actually shape viewers’ opinions about a candidate’s trustworthiness, or has it indeed become part of the culture wars? Also, how many debate viewers will actually visit the CBS website or tune in to watch the post-debate fact-check?

But even without these answers, critics of CBS have a point, considering that Vance also has an extensive record of flat-out lying. Recall, for example, that Vance unleashed the lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, leading to Trump repeating it on the debate stage to tens of millions of viewers. And before Trump named Vance his running mate, the Hillbilly Elegy author was one of the many Republicans who went on television to question the 2020 election results—despite the fact that more than 60 lawsuits the Trump campaign filed questioning the integrity of the election were found to be without merit.

Particularly in these times—when the Republican candidate for the presidency is a convicted felon who tried to subvert the 2020 election and still refuses to admit his loss—journalists have to do more than give the candidates a pair of microphones and let them have at it. As Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein wrote in 2019, “Journalists can’t just dispassionately chronicle two equally valid ‘sides.’ A free press needs (and is needed by) lowercase-d democracy. We can’t exist without it.”