Opinion: CBS News gives JD Vance license to lie at VP debate. What are we doing here?
Great news for people who enjoy lies: CBS News won’t allow its vice presidential debate moderators to engage in any fact-checking.
That is an excellent decision. For starters, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, is severely allergic to facts – that is a fact – and nobody wants Tuesday night’s debate stopped midway through while aides to the Republican vice presidential nominee rush onstage to jab him with EpiPens.
More important, facts are for losers, and fact-checking makes Republicans in general, and Donald Trump in particular, SUPER mad.
Republicans rightly believe all fact-checkers should be locked up
At the first presidential debate between former President Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis corrected four of Trump’s approximately 18 million lies. That caused GOP pundits and lawmakers and, of course, Trump himself to collectively freak out over what they saw as a wholly unwarranted act of journalism.
The CEO of the online right-wing falsehood factory called The Federalist calmly and rationally posted on social media: “Remove ABC's broadcast license and criminally charge the moderators and executives for campaign finance fraud.”
The audacity of those journalists to correct Trump when he repeated the racist and entirely fabricated allegation that legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, have been eating people’s pets. Real-time fact-checking like that is definitely a criminal offense, as long as you live in a world where the presentation of facts is considered a criminal act. If Trump were president, those moderators would have been arrested on the spot. (And that’s a fact.)
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CBS News caved to the Trump campaign and won't fact-check VP debate
Clearly, the vice presidential debate hosts at CBS News heard the former president and his supporter's complaints loud and clear, then bravely caved to those wise and not-at-all-autocratic purveyors of rapid-fire dishonesty.
Claudia Milne, CBS News’ senior vice president for standards and practices, told The New York Times: “The goal of the debate is to facilitate a good debate between the candidates, and the moderators will give them the opportunity to fact-check each other in real time.”
The network will provide fact-checks online, smartly avoiding holding either candidate accountable mid-lie during the live event and making sure fewer people find out the truth.
It’s a setup that will allow Vance – who only lies when he’s using nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs – to say whatever he wants while his Democratic opponent, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, can fact-check him through the scuba mask he’ll wear to keep from drowning in Vance’s duplicity.
A possible exchange in a fact-check-free vice presidential debate
Here’s a hypothetical example of how the NO-FACT-CHECKING-ALLOWED debate might go:
Vance: “Vice President Kamala Harris is calling for an end to the child tax credit, and I think that’s terrible.”
Moderators: “Gov. Walz, your rebuttal?”
Walz: “Well, that’s just demonstrably false. The vice president has always supported the child tax credit and, in fact, wants to expand it. Sen. Vance is lying again and you’re just allowing him to say things that are objectively false with zero pushback whatsoever.”
Moderators: “OK.”
Vance: “Also, Tim Walz loves eating cats. His neighbors say they had to stop getting cats because the governor would just steal and eat them constantly. He routinely held barbecues where he and his fellow satanists ate cats.”
Moderators: “Gov. Walz, your response?”
Walz: “My response? Are you freakin’ kidding me? He’s just making crap up!!!”
Moderators: “OK. Next question …”
Trump is already spinning election-denial nonsense
That’s exactly how an important political debate should happen during an age when one political party largely exists in a fantasy world that bears no resemblance to reality.
For example, CNN reported Monday that Trump “has made at least 12 distinct false claims over the last two months that raise baseless doubts about the validity of a potential victory by Vice President Kamala Harris.”
Following the Trump-world/ABC News theory that fact-checking is evil, the people responsible for that CNN report should be arrested and prosecuted for crimes against dishonesty, and the network should have its broadcast license revoked.
Why fact-check guys who just make stuff up all the time?
Also Monday, Trump visited Georgia in the wake of Hurricane Helene and said of the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp: “The governor is doing a good job, but he's having a hard time getting the president on the phone. They're being very nonresponsive.”
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Earlier in the day, however, Kemp himself said he talked to President Joe Biden on Sunday: “He offered that if there’s other things we need just to call him directly, which I appreciate that.”
Should Trump’s comment be fact-checked? Of course not. It’s up to the people to decide when a politician is lying. That’s in the Bible and the U.S. Constitution, probably, and I'm sure it's mentioned repeatedly in Alexis de Tocqueville's classic work "Democracy in America."
Tim Walz should lie like crazy at the debate. Who's going to stop him?
Americans don’t need fancy “news” organizations to help them separate fact from fiction. In fact, they don’t even need to know there’s a difference between fact and fiction.
I believe it was none other than President George Washington who once said, “The most awesome form of democracy is believing whatever you want to believe. Post that (expletive) on my Insta!”
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So kudos to CBS News for having the patriotic and journalistic good sense to impotently cave to the political party that most fears fact-checking.
And good luck to Gov. Walz, who should fight fire with fire by making his opening line: “Good evening. My opponent JD Vance, who we know is romantically involved with a paisley sectional sofa, has singlehandedly murdered 143 circus clowns.”
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Opinion: CBS gives Vance free rein to lie unchecked at VP debate