I left out the last few paragraphs as it went into Trump and Fox complaints.
By clearly stating the facts on key issues, Norah O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan ensured that reality was not warped.
www.status.news
>>>CBS News did not sit idly on the sidelines.
Moderators
Norah O'Donnell and
Margaret Brennan facilitated a substantive vice presidential debate between
J.D. Vance and
Tim Walz on Tuesday night, while also interjecting with necessary fact-checks during the high-stakes political showdown.
By clearly —
and authoritatively — stating the facts on issues such as climate change and immigration, O'Donnell and Brennan ensured that reality was not warped by Vance, much to the GOP candidate's displeasure. After Brennan
fact-checked Vance on the
Haitian migrants in
Springfield, Vance even complained.
"The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact check," Vance claimed.
The
written rules, however, did not appear to address fact checking. Nevertheless, ahead of the debate, CBS News had initially signaled O'Donnell and Brennan would perhaps avoid doing so in real-time, instead placing the onus on the candidates to fact-check each other. That led to widespread condemnation of CBS News, including from former anchor
Dan Rather, who
wrote a piece zinging the Tiffany Network.
But,
as I reported Monday, CBS News had in fact left open the possibility that the moderators would step in and establish a baseline of truth. When the lights turned on and the cameras started rolling Tuesday night, O’Donnell and Brennan ultimately made the prudent editorial choice to correct the record on issues of significance.
While the fact-checks were effective, the debate wasn’t necessarily perfect. As
The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser pointed out, “The conceit of this CBS debate is that this is just a normal policy election, two guys shooting the poop about housing starts and health care financing.”
“Misses the moment pretty dramatically,” Glasser added.
Indeed, the crucial issue of democracy and the January 6 insurrection was relegated to the latter half of the Vance-Walz face-off. And when Vance misled the public on election denialism and declined to say whether
Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, O’Donnell and Brennan opted to stay silent.<<<
