A few minutes after the conclusion of Thursday night’s presidential debate, media reporter Brian Stelter, formerly of CNN, posted the following reaction from an unnamed executive at the network:
“Jake and Dana,” of course, are Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, the CNN anchors who moderated Thursday night’s debate, and I guess there actually are a few reasons for their bosses to be “very proud” of their performance. The debate was orderly and theoretically substantive in a way that most presidential debates are not. Bash and Tapper wasted no time with the sorts of smarmy throwaway questions that have plagued many other political debates. Neither of the moderators had chocolate on their face.
And yet the CNN executive’s assessment helps to explain precisely why the debate was, in many ways, a journalistic failure. Most of the post-debate punditry has justifiably focused on President Joe Biden’s abysmal performance, and its implications for the Democratic ticket. Indeed, it’s hard not to focus on Biden’s mumbly, unfocused answers, or his somnolent on-camera presence whenever he wasn’t speaking. But there were two candidates on stage Thursday night, and only one of them—former President Donald Trump—spent most of the debate blatantly lying about his record while spewing unfounded allegations at his counterpart. CNN’s failure to meaningfully fact-check, follow up, or push back on Trump’s lies and evasions in real time thwarted its goal of helping voters make informed decisions—and ensured that the day-after debate takeaways would focus primarily on Biden’s demeanor while letting Trump slide on his near-total lack of substance.
According to Stelter’s source, CNN believed that it had a two-part job on Thursday night: “to make sure that candidates were heard” so that “voters can make informed decisions.” I actually thought the network did a pretty good job with the first part of that goal. Pretty much every other presidential debate or town hall in which Trump has ever participated has eventually devolved into chaos—a function of the ex-president’s poor impulse control and general disregard for any and all constraints on his behavior. These sorts of bombastic spectacles might make for entertaining viewing, but they’re not particularly informative, and they’re generally unworthy of the networks that air them. Indeed, the last time that CNN gave Donald Trump a prime-time platform—the infamous May 2023 “town hall” moderated by Kaitlan Collins—it went so disastrously that it basically cost the network’s then-CEO his job.
CNN’s relatively new CEO, Mark Thompson, presumably wanted to ensure that the first general-election debate held under his watch would look very, very different than the town hall debacle. He got his wish, even if the credit for it doesn’t go entirely to CNN; in pre-debate negotiations, the Biden campaign insisted that the candidates’ microphones be muted when they weren’t answering a question, and that the debate not be held in front of a live audience. Even so, Trump largely followed the rules, and it is not CNN’s fault that Biden came across as an agitated old man who was up past his bedtime. That’s on the president and his team, exclusively, and there’s nothing that CNN could or should have done in the moment to adjust for Biden’s deer-in-headlights performance.
And yet there is plenty that CNN could and should have done to better fulfill the second part of its self-proclaimed mandate: ensuring that “voters can make informed decisions.” In its way, Trump’s debate performance was just as alarming as Biden’s. The former president was characteristically dishonest and evasive in most of his answers to Bash and Tapper’s questions. Among other things, he lied once again about nonexistent fraud in the 2020 presidential elections; lied about the relative size of America’s trade deficit with China; lied about having had sex with a porn star; falsely asserted that Biden “gets paid by China”; falsely claimed that Democrats were “putting [undocumented migrants] onto Social Security”; falsely asserted that the myriad prosecutions against him were directly masterminded by Biden; falsely claimed that the Biden administration was in favor of infanticide; and called Biden a “Manchurian candidate” and a “very bad Palestinian. A weak one.”
And yet Tapper and Bash pushed back on almost none of this. While they occasionally asked follow-up questions when candidates failed to directly answer the initial question—Bash asked Trump three times whether he would accept the results of the November elections, and never got a direct answer—they did almost nothing to challenge Trump (or Biden) in real time, or to press either man whenever they said something misleading or untrue. Instead, they just kept saying “Thank you,” in an almost eerie way at times, and moving on to the next topic.
This passivity was both a missed opportunity and a great disservice to viewers. Both as journalists and as people charged with helping voters make informed choices, it was very important for Bash and Tapper to be prepared to rebut and contextualize Trump’s bombast and dishonesty. Low-information voters deserve to know when candidates are saying things that just flat-out aren’t true, and the moderators are the only people with the power and the opportunity to call these things out in a way that comes across as informative rather than accusatory. It wouldn’t have even been hard to do. Trump has like six standard riffs that he repeats over and over, and CNN could have easily predicted some of the things he was going to say, and could have been prepared with facts and footage to rebut him. They could and should have done the same for Biden, too.
Thursday’s debate only deepened my convictions here. I forcefully disagree with the school of thought that says that the job of the moderators is just to keep the debate moving, and that the moderators shouldn’t inject themselves into the substance of the debate. If that’s the case, then why bother having journalists moderate the debate at all? If all that the moderators are going to do is to read questions and keep time, then you might as well just select the moderators by lottery, or have fourth-graders read the questions, or have beloved cartoon characters moderate in a Who Framed Roger Rabbit?–style setup. Why have Jake Tapper and Dana Bash up there at all?
I get that there may have been conditions on the debate that prevented Bash and Tapper from pushing back on the candidates’ answers. If so, the conditions were bad ones and should never have been agreed to. If the moderator is just a timekeeper, then the moderator doesn’t have to be a journalist. But if journalists are going to moderate the debates, then they need to act journalistically and ensure that facts take center stage—which is especially important when it comes to Donald Trump, who lies pretty much every time he opens his mouth, and almost never puts himself in position to be called out or held accountable for it.
Nationally televised debates are some of the few opportunities that voters have to see presidential candidates be made to answer for their policies, statements, and positions. But when moderators sidestep the chance to hold candidates accountable for these things in real time, then these debates just become referenda on a candidate’s demeanor and debating ability—which is why the narrative is now focused on Biden’s alarmingly drowsy performance rather than Trump’s alarmingly dishonest one. Yes, it’s important to ensure that each candidate is heard at these debates. But it’s so much more important to hold the candidates responsible for the things they actually say.