Two old statements haunted my thoughts during Tuesday’s vice presidential debate between Republican nominee Sen. JD Vance of Ohio and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee.
The first was an off-the-cuff remark that CBS’ former top executive Les Moonves said about Donald Trump’s late entry into the presidential race more than eight years ago: “The money’s rolling in and this is fun,” he told a roomful of suits attending that year’s Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco.
He was referring to the ballooning ad spends by competing candidates, observing that “most of the ads are not about issues. They’re sort of like the debates.”
“It may not be good for America,” Moonves added jovially, “but it’s damn good for CBS.”
Mentioning this as a segue into analyzing Norah O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan’s performance as debate moderators may not seem fair. O’Donnell, the CBS Evening News anchor and managing editor, and Brennan, CBS News’ chief foreign affairs correspondent and the moderate for "Face the Nation,” bear no responsibility for their former boss’ moral rot. (CBS fired Moonves in 2018 following its investigation into multiple allegations of sexual assault and misconduct going back decades.)
Still, no longstanding institution enacts a philosophical about-face overnight, especially when the profession it is representing has been under attack for decades. An ascendant right-wing media ecosystem is devoted to tearing down the trustworthiness of legacy broadcast media.
The assaults have only become more virulent since Trump won the 2016 election with ample help from foreign and domestic disinformation campaigns.
The news and information consumer has not recovered from this and shows few signs that they will. Our inability to agree on a common set of facts and truths remains a mournfully repeated refrain, demonstrated within the substance of Tuesday night’s statements and rebuttals between the candidates.
But the moderators’ velvet-gloved handling of fact-checking, couched as clarification, was not enough to buttress the event’s anemic utility.
O’Donnell and Brennan directly checked Vance's statements a few times. The first came early in the 90-minute telecast during a question about climate change tied to the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene.
When Vance characterized the scientific community’s finding that carbon emissions are driving climate change as “weird science,” the primetime anchor said at the end of his response. “The overwhelming consensus among scientists is that the earth's climate is warming at an unprecedented rate.” Good on her.
Brennan got under Vance’s skin and he tried to pivot away from directly answering whether Trump’s plan for mass deportations would include separating children of undocumented migrants from their families, including those born on American soil, by incorrectly defining the Haitian migrants in Springfield, OH., as part of the “millions of illegal immigrants” supposedly destroying American lives.
“Just to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status. Temporary protected status,” she said, attempting to throw to O'Donnell for a topic change to the economy.
But Vance wouldn't let that go, “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check,” he said. “And since you’re fact-checking me, I think it’s important to say what’s actually going on.” Vance kept talking over O'Donnell and Brennan, ever so politely, repeated some version of, “Thank you, Senator, for describing the legal process. We have so much to get to, Senator. We have so much…” until the producers cut the candidates’ mics.
This debate, hosted by CBS News at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York, is the third and possibly final presidential candidate face-off of the 2024 election. It followed President Joe Biden’s campaign-ending match with Trump on CNN and Vice President Kamala Harris tapping in for the knockout on ABC.
Depending on who's doing the analyzing, it was as inconsequential as past pre-election veep matches or extremely important, considering that one of the contenders is the second to the oldest presidential candidate in history against whom there have been two assassination attempts.
Viewing the debates as an advertisement, Vance, who was polling as one of the least popular vice presidential contenders in modern times, had a much better night than Walz.
O’Donnell, Brennan and CBS News helped make that possible.
As most analysts warned before the debate began, a lack of real-time fact-checking aided the Republican nominee. CBS, which has the oldest primetime audience among broadcasters with a median age of 67.8, directed viewers to a QR code which, when scanned, would take them to the network’s fact-checking site. ("I love that CBS thinks their viewers know how to use a QR code," Jimmy Kimmel joked on his post-debate episode. "Their newest show is 'Matlock'.")
Of course, it could have eliminated that step by including a live scroll on the side of the screen dedicated to that purpose, which should have been easier to run in this debate since Vance doesn’t lie at the same volume and rate as Trump.
But CBS didn’t, likely out of concern that insisting on such a helpful tool would have led to the Republican nominees’ refusing to participate. And not without reason, since Trump backed out of a scheduled "60 Minutes" interview on the same day as the debate.
CBS News’ official rules did not specify that O’Donnell and Brennan wouldn’t be allowed to fact-check – rather, to clarify unclear statements. That is, as we witnessed, not quite the same thing but more than enough to throw Vance slightly off-balance, especially since neither O’Donnell nor Brennan announced they’d be wielding this workaround during the debate.
Instead, the co-moderators only informed viewers of the network’s line that the candidates would have the opportunity to fact-check each other’s claims. Anyone operating with a modicum of critical thinking could see how Vance would benefit from that decision.
So did Walz, by the way, when he inaccurately blurted “Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies,” and the moderators let that pass uncontested.
That right-wing manual says plenty of legitimately terrifying things, including the proposal Walz mischaracterizes. The specifics are as repugnant, if not more so. Project 2025 would have the Department of Health and Human Services require all states to report detailed information about abortions that are performed within their borders and include an invasive level of private data down to the reason for the abortion and the method used to perform it.
It took me a few seconds to look that up – it’s on page 455 of the doorstop, in case you’re wondering. Viewers certainly could have as well, since the proceedings, though collegial, were dull enough for anybody to follow a second screen without missing much.
Or, and here’s a crazy idea, CBS News could have fulfilled its public service duty to provide accurate information to better inform their viewers' understanding of each candidate by pasting the manual's verbiage into a live scroll.
Relatively light fact-checking is better than none, I suppose.
This brings me to the second voice echoing in my memory throughout those 90 minutes, that of MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell.
In recent months, O'Donnell has used his late primetime show “The Last Word” to take the establishment media to task, including his own network.
On the August day that reporters flocked to Mar-a-Lago for a “press conference” set up in a way that the audience could not hear most of the questions but all of Trump’s babbling and lies, the MSNBC anchor was beside himself.
He lamented the lack of a corrective live scroll in that situation too, but his ire wasn't limited to that. “Reporters understandably and incorrectly believe that the most important thing a candidate can do is answer their questions, but they don't know what an answer actually is,” MSNBC’s O’Donnell observes in his show-opening monologue. “Words spoken after their question marks are not necessarily answers.”
We've accepted that to be the case with our presidential debates too. But something else “The Last Word” host pointed out then is acutely relevant to Tuesday’s performance by CBS News: Most of the questions at that conference “were terrible, the silliest possible questions you could ask."
Norah O’Donnell and Brennan’s queries weren’t terrible, but they were poorly worded and organized, allowing the candidates to avoid accountability for past statements.
Walz’s epic flub in addressing his disproven claims of having been in Tiananmen Square when the 1989 protests and massacre took place was more a factor of his lack of debate skills than the moderators’ pointed questioning.
But the questions posed to Vance concerning his past statements about backing a national abortion ban lacked enough specificity in their phrasing for the Ohio senator to claim he never supported one.
It would have been as simple as Norah O’Donnell citing in her question when he did, which was on a January 2022 podcast, along with his exact quote. Believe me when I say I am no fan of Megyn Kelly, but she did a better job of holding Trump accountable for his misogyny in 2015 by doing exactly that, line by line.
Allowing Vance’s lie about his and Trump’s stances on abortion to go unchallenged gave the impression, as one pregnant undecided voter on CNN’s panel put it, that the Republican platform on reproductive rights is “more progressive” than it is.
The moderators’ choice to leave until the end questions about the Jan. 6 insurrection and Trump’s plan to contest the results also did voters a disservice. This, indeed, is the most important question dangling before us in this election and should have been asked first. O’Donnell did not specifically mention the insurrection in her question, leaving Vance and Walz to say the words themselves.
Admittedly, this led to one of the evening’s most animated exchanges. Telling, too, when Walz directly asked Vance if he accepted the legitimate results of the 2020 elections and Vance responded with what his opponent accurately described as “a damning non-answer.”
We’ve been conditioned to view these action spikes for their entertainment value, assessing them through the framework of whether they made our candidate of choice look better. That view has always been antithetical to the civics purpose of television political debates, but we forgot that long ago, and certainly after candidates figured out how much being telegenic trumps honesty and platform positions.
All this forgets how abnormal this election is, to say nothing of our national politics and inability to effectively govern. Those factors are so distracting that viewers might not have noticed that not a single question was asked about the uptick in attempts by foreign actors, including Iranian hackers and Russian propagandists, to influence the election’s outcome by flooding us with misinformation.
Or the very pertinent issue of what each candidate plans for Ukraine and NATO, both of which are directly tied future of liberal democracy in Western Europe and the ascension of Russian and Chinese influence on the global stage.
I would have traded the time spent listening to Vance explain his change of heart on Trump (it’s the naked political ambition, stupid) or Walz’s Hong Kong hooey to hear both weigh in on that since their outcome stands to affect everything from our economy to our safety.
But these omissions prove part of what Moonves said to be accurate – the debate was great advertising, especially for Vance. After Tuesday, Republicans who were going to vote for Trump despite his increasing incoherence and lack of impulse control can feel better about it.
The Vance who showed up at CBS seemed reasonable, misled the audience confidently and smoothly, and wrapped an extremist agenda in a fuchsia tie and a few folksy stories to seem family-friendly. An authentic if bumbling Walz wasn’t ready to slap down his lies. The people best equipped to do that, CBS’ moderators, barely rose to that duty.
To echo the other O’Donnell on MSNBC, it was 2016 all over again.
