EDITORIAL: Debate moderators fail without fact

For any TV executives out there, there are a few markers to consider when wondering how well your primetime political special played out. Here’s one: when your host causes more conversation than the candidates do, it didn’t go well.

No disrespect meant to NBC News chief (and Boston University alum!) Andrew Lack, but MSNBC’s Commander-in-Chief Forum on Sept. 7 did not go well. What had been billed as a chance for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to make their case before the nation’s armed forces became instead, the consensus seemed, a chance for Today host and forum moderator Matt Lauer to make his own case for why political journalism isn’t his forte.

It’s hard to pick one point of outrage. The crowd favorite, of course, was Lauer’s implicit acceptance of Trump’s boast that he “was totally against the war in Iraq,” a claim Trump hinged rather precariously on a 2004 Esquire feature about himself. His interviews up to and immediately after the invasion, though, tell a different story, as has been pointed out. An editor’s note recently added to the Esquire feature rightly illuminates the issue there. Trump told a lie, and Lauer moved on.

Born from the searing takes that followed was a collective warning to the moderators of this fall’s presidential debates: be better. Lester Holt (NBC News), Martha Raddatz (ABC News), Anderson Cooper (CNN) and Chris Wallace (Fox News), all experienced as journalists but untested as presidential moderators, will have to decide how much of the former they plan to bring to the latter.

Wallace, at least, knows what kind of moderator he plans to be. The most seasoned journalist of the bunch, he said in a Sept. 4 interview on his network that “I do not believe it is my job to be a truth squad,” instead putting the responsibility on the candidates themselves to swat down anything they know to be untrue. He’s not the first to think so. At a University of Notre Dame forum Wednesday night, veteran moderators Jim Lehrer and Bob Schieffer echoed as much.

“You’re not a judge,” Schieffer said, according to CNN. “You’re a moderator.”

Ever the progressive, Trump suggested Monday morning that we do away with the moderator altogether. Imagine the screaming. No, in an election so rife with cries of dishonesty from both sides, the answer is more oversight, not less.

Now, the merits of tenacious journalism have been well-documented in this election. It took plenty of follow-up after MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked Trump to define his pro-life stance before the candidate finally suggested that women who receive abortions should be subject to punishment. CNN’s Jake Tapper asked 23 times whether Trump’s criticism of a Mexican-American judge was potentially racist.

These are the sort of insights that voters deserve to know about both candidates. Interviews serve little purpose if the journalists conducting them, effectively the stand-ins for American voters, contentedly take the candidates at their words.

And because journalistic standards — the devotion to truth without fear or favor — don’t change when more players are involved, that should go for debates, too. Charging the candidates with policing each other’s claims is not only lazy, but also dangerous. In this country, unfortunate as it is, one candidate calling another candidate a liar doesn’t make that candidate right. It makes the truth political.

Anyone who believes in honesty in politics, journalists doubly, should fear that outcome. The candidates’ claims, ideology aside, should at the very least be grounded in fact. There’s even a snappy solution that both sides can enjoy. In an open letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates, Salon’s Jordan Hoffner proposed a nonpartisan fact-checking panel, separate from the moderator, that Trump or Clinton could invoke via “challenging” his or her opponent’s claims, up to twice per debate, like NBA coaches protesting a play. If nothing else, it’d be great television.

Otherwise, the moderators have some studying-up to do. The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan said it well, in responding to Wallace’s frame-of-mind: “If journalists aren’t interested in being part of the truth squad, they should find another sport.” If you see veracity as beside the point, well, you could always run for president.