ABC News’ Lindsey Davis and David Muir moderated the presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris on Sept. 10. The debate, the second of the year, highlights the breakdown of the traditional forums of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which was created in 1987. The commission had originally planned to hold a series of debates in the fall that neither political party would agree to for their campaigns.

The failure of that process led to the media networks’ current debate events, now moderated by CNN and ABC. Most analysts recognize that Muir and Davis engaged in partisan fact-checking against the Trump campaign, raising questions about how the next debate between vice presidential candidates Senator JD Vance (Republican, Ohio) and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (Democrat) might be moderated by CBS News journalists Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan.

The CNN debate and the recent ABC debate saw some positive progress toward better debate moderation. Chris Wallace spent 25 percent of the debate time in 2020 making his own arguments. Moderator Steve Scully was disciplined before his debate for planning attacks against candidate Trump.

The idea of ​​journalistic moderators “stepping in” and “fact-checking” candidates dates back to the activism Candy Crowley took when she moderated the 2012 debate between Republican candidate Mitt Romney and President Obama. The first Romney-Obama debate resulted in public polls suggesting Obama lost quite significantly. Crowley believed the outcome was skewed by a lack of “fact-checking” and promised to fact-check the debate live, despite being assured that such actions would not be permitted by the moderators.

A similar dynamic was seen in the period between the June 27 debate and the September 10 debate moderated by ABC. The June 27 debate saw less attention to facts by CNN. President Biden suffered a decisive defeat in that debate, leading to his withdrawal from the election. Lindsay Davis made it clear after the September 10 debate that she believes CNN moderators failed to fact-check and that her own fact-checking was a positive. She and Muir fact-checked Trump five times without ever fact-checking Harris, even though Harris made a number of provocative factual claims that arguably would have been worthy of verification.

Harris, for example, said: “Donald Trump has left us with the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.” She made this statement on the eve of the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, arguably the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.

She also said: “And at this point in time, not a single member of the U.S. armed forces on active duty is in a combat zone in any war zone in the world – that is the first time this century has happened.” However, thousands of U.S. soldiers on active duty were (and are) in combat zones in Syria and Iraq, and some of them had already come under fire less than a month before the debate.

This shows that real-time fact-checking is incompatible with the true goals of political debate. In political debates and speeches, candidates make inherently controversial claims that are not easily verified, such as “best economy” or “worst war.”

In real debates, there are always fact-checkers – namely, the opposing debater and the voters themselves. Biden and Trump had equal opportunities to check each other’s facts. When the journalistic moderators reject their ethical obligation to remain impartial, they abandon the non-partisan role of journalists.

Moreover, in 1960, when televised presidential debates first began, Congress changed campaign laws to allow the debates between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy. The main legal obstacle was the deeply held belief that broadcasters should not abuse their power to unfairly influence presidential elections. Muir and Davis’s behavior runs counter to the general ethics of academic debate as practiced by high school and college students around the world. No debater expects the judge or timekeeper to stop the debate and make statements about how misleading or false certain statements are.

All of these problems point to an ethical concern that is entirely legitimate: television stations and their employees must not interfere inappropriately in political election campaigns. This concern has existed since the introduction of television debates.

Like CNN, CBS now faces a dilemma over how to handle the vice presidential debate on October 1. Ideally, the moderators would say almost nothing and the candidates would have more time to make their opening statements, in which they might be able to lay out a particular policy issue that many voters still want to hear.

Live fact-checking by CBS journalists would reinforce the already bleak image the public has of journalists covering politics in America. Polls of journalists show a growing desire to openly align with the Democratic Party (28 percent in 2013 to 36 percent in 2022), while the desire to align with the Republican Party is declining (7.1 percent in 2013 to 3.4 percent in 2022).

The public still wants a fairer political debate in the United States. The high ratings show that citizens are demanding a fair debate. Journalists must fulfill their important ethical role as a free press, not as an ideologically imprisoned one.

Failure to meet this ethical requirement is not only problematic in terms of informing the electorate, but can also constitute a violation of our election campaign laws, which are designed to protect the public from abuse of their broadcasting rights. The Election Code currently states that any political debate “must include at least two candidates and must be structured so as not to promote or favor one candidate over another.”

ABC’s conduct of the September 10 debate arguably failed to meet this legal standard. CBS has a legal, ethical and civic obligation to call out the conduct of its moderators at the October 1 vice presidential debate.

Ben Voth, PhD, is professor of rhetoric and chair of the debate department at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He is the author of six academic books on rhetoric and argumentation, including James Farmer Jr.: The Great Debaters (Lexington, 2017) and Debate as Global Pedagogy: Rwanda Rising (Lexington, 2021), in which he details how public debate positively influences public policy.

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