Our Fact-Free VP Debate

Working the refs pays off for Trump/Vance

Rest assured, as you tune into tonight’s vice presidential debate, that you will not be subjected to any wanton acts of journalism from the reporters running the show. After predictable howls of outrage from Republicans about the tiny fraction of Trump’s falsehoods that the moderators intervened to correct, CBS News has compliantly declared its hosts will refrain from weighing in, leaving it to the contestants to fact-check each other. Which in practice means that Vance and Walz will contradict each other, and viewers will be left to their own devices in determining who is telling the truth.

This is in many ways a predictable capitulation: Faced with shrinking audiences and declining public trust, many mainstream news outlets seem to have convinced themselves that they can win back Republican viewers and readers if only they perform a kind of bogus neutrality by refusing to point out that one side lies far more often and far more egregiously than the other. But it’s nevertheless a gross dereliction of duty that misserves their viewers.

Let’s be frank: These debates are not for you, except perhaps as entertainment. If you are reading a politics-heavy text newsletter, you are almost certainly the sort of voter who long ago made up their mind between two starkly different candidates. The undecided voters whose ballot might actually be influenced by tonights proceedings, on the other hand, are not like you. They are not hyper-fixated on politics, don’t know much about it, or worse, “know” a lot of things that aren’t true scrounged from desultory scrolling on social media. They are the least likely to be able to recognize when a candidate tells a lie you would regard as obvious, and the least equipped to figure out via research after the fact which claims are false—assuming they make the attempt rather than throwing up their arms in disgust and frustration.

This abdication is particularly irresponsible when we consider the nature of the lies coming from the Vance/Trump camp. Lying in politics is nothing new, but politicians in the pre-Trump era typically restricted themselves to a kind of deception within parameters—respectable lying, if you will. The embellishment or exaggeration of some more-or-less factual claim; the study or statistic or projection cherry picked from a range of options to best support the speaker’s case. Respectable lies are misleading but, well, debatable, or at least a bit nuanced. Not the sort of claim, in most cases, amenable to a simple “that’s just factually false” intervention, and perhaps not worth disrupting the flow of the debate to correct.

Trump and Vance, however, long since rocketed beyond the bounds of respectable lying into simple fabrication. And most recently, they’re fabrications that have done concrete, immediate harm to vulnerable communities. The deranged fiction that (legal) Haitian migrants in Springfield, Illinois, were abducting and eating pets—advanced first by Vance and notoriously repeated by Trump during his debate with Harris—led to a spate of bomb and death threats that have disrupted life there and terrorized the population.

The refusal to check that sort of lie is not just poor journalism on CBS’s part: It is active participation in stochastic terrorism. They have made an executive decision to let their affiliates’ airwaves be predictably used to promulgate vile slanders, which will pass without comment or intervention even when the moderators know the claims are false, with equally predictable and damaging consequences for the communities targeted. That is not just a dereliction of journalistic ethics, but of basic human decency.