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VIDEO: Lester Holt Proved We Need Fact-Checking In Debates

VIDEO: Lester Holt Proved We Need Fact-Checking In Debates

Published with permission from Media Matters for America

Lester Holt challenged Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on claims he made during the first presidential debate, highlighting the value of having moderators who are willing to fact-check false claims in real-time.

During the September 26 presidential debate, moderator Holt challenged Trump on inaccurate claims the candidate made about releasing his tax returns, promoting the birther conspiracy, and supporting the war in Iraq:

Holt stayed out of much of the debate, but intervened when Trump made glaring factual errors about his own record. Holt’s restraint made his fact-checks more powerful, drawing significant attention to Trump’s falsehoods, and tripping up the candidate before he could turn those lies into attacks on his opponent.

Holt’s fact-checking likely had a significant impact on the millions of voters for whom the debate was a first hard look at the candidates. But it’s just one battle in the larger struggle over whether moderators should fact-check the candidates in real-time. Both campaigns have argued over the issue, with Trump’s campaign predictably arguing that moderators should stay out of factual disputes during the debates.

That argument has gained some notable supporters — NBC’s Matt Lauer was harshly criticized for failing to fact-check Trump’s claims about opposing the Iraq War during this month’s presidential forum. Fox News’ Chris Wallace, who will moderate the final presidential debate, has already said he doesn’t believe it’s job to be a “truth squad.” Even the executive director of the Commission on Presidential Debates told CNN recently that moderators shouldn’t be fact-checkers.

But leaving the fact-checking to the candidates, rather than the moderators, can contribute to spreading misinformation among voters. Research suggests that audiences that watch this kind of “he said/she said” debate end up feeling less capable of figuring out the truth, causing some to give up trying to resolve factual disputes altogether. Moderators who can carefully choose to intervene during important factual disputes offer a powerful antidote to that kind of passive misinformation.

Lester Holt’s performance set a powerful example of the value that measured fact-checks can have in keeping candidate’s honest. If the other debate moderators follow his lead, they’ll be doing voters, and the whole of campaign journalism, a real service.

Photo and video: PBS/Media Matters for America

Trump Wins? In First Debate, We Need Corporate Media To Play Hardball

Trump Wins? In First Debate, We Need Corporate Media To Play Hardball

Apparently pretty much everyone I know is a bed-wetter.

The term gained currency in politics in January 2010 when Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe, in a Washington Post opinion piece[3] titled “November doesn’t need to be a nightmare for Democrats,” gave this advice to his party: “No bed-wetting.” “Instead of fearing what may happen,” he wrote, “let’s fight like hell.”

He could have gone with the blander, “No hand-wringing,” which wouldn’t have risked offending enuresis sufferers. But “bed-wetting” got traction in the American political lexicon – even though, as it turned out, Republicans picked up 63 seats in the House that November and recaptured the majority, a nightmare that retroactively warranted plenty of dread about nocturnal incontinence.

Plouffe was back at it during this summer’s Democratic Convention. “No bed-wetting,” he tweeted. “Clinton will enter August with strong electoral college advantage.” But that lead has since been blown, and now my in-box is positively leaking anxiety.

Tell me Trump won’t win, my friends are emailing. It’s a slow-motion train wreck, they’re saying, and I feel helpless to stop it. Why is the media letting Trump get away with it? I wouldn’t be so nervous if it weren’t for Gary Johnson; if it weren’t for millennial apathy, for alt-right propaganda, for Paul Ryan’s cowardice; if it weren’t for sexism, racism, infotainment, Idiocracy, plutocracy, Citizens United, voter suppression…. Help!

Now comes the first debate, adding fresh impetus to stock up on mattress pads. Yet no matter what Clinton does, the Trump-wins-first-debate narrative has already been written:

– Trump and Clinton will share the same stage. He is not a normal candidate, or even a normal person. She is. No matter what happens during the debate, it is declared afterward that the one-on-one matchup has “normalized” Trump. So Trump wins.

– Because the bar for a successful Trump performance has been set so low, when Trump fails to threaten to punch Clinton, it is acclaimed as evidence of his presidential temperament and general election pivot.  Trump wins.

– Trump will attack Clinton. Clinton will defend herself. The verdict: Trump was strong; Clinton was on the defensive. But people want strength. Trump wins.

– The moderator, NBC’s Lester Holt, will call Trump on a lie. Trump will heap scorn on Holt, NBC, MSNBC, the Commission on Presidential Debates and the corrupt, dishonest media. Gallup says public trust in the media is now at an all-time low. People will love Trump’s attack on Holt. Trump wins.

– Clinton will nail Trump for lying. He’ll lie so much, she won’t be able to keep up with him. Fact-checkers will say, after the fact, that his pants were on fire, but it won’t matter. The debate will be scored for entertainment value, not truth-value. Clinton’s zingers will be called scripted. Trump’s taunts will be so uncivil, so beyond the political pale, so viciously funny, he will be crowned the change candidate in a change election year. Trump wins.

– Trump and Clinton will go after each other so relentlessly that the debate will be called a draw. But the Beltway consensus is that Clinton needs to win; Trump just needs to tie. So a tie is a win. Trump wins.

Even if Clinton wipes the floor with Trump, the media’s inherent bias is for suspense. The media business model requires capturing and keeping the audience’s attention, so corporations can sell our eyeballs to advertisers. It doesn’t matter how the debates go, or what the polls say; the press will portray the final stretch of this horserace as neck and neck, a photo finish, you won’t want to miss this, stay tuned.

Four years ago, I predicted that Romney would win the first debate. For this clairvoyance, a colleague dubbed me “a Jewish prophet.” I wish I could take credit for knowing that Obama would grudgingly phone in his performance, but all I did was deduce what good storytelling required the first debate and its aftermath to be: a rout, followed by a comeback. Trump’s campaign has signaled that he’s doing minimal prep for the debate. Maybe this is garden-variety expectation lowering, but even if he bombs, no media narrative will cover the last six weeks of the campaign as anything but a nail-biter.

If worrying that Trump can win this election makes me a bed-wetter, too, I cop to it. What could turn the race around? It’d help if the press didn’t make the same mistake over and over. Last Friday, when Trump conned the networks into turning what was billed as a press conference about Obama’s birthplace into a half-hour live broadcast of veterans’ testimonials for Trump and an infomercial for his new hotel, CNN’s John King admitted on air, “We got played again by the Trump campaign, which is what they do.” No doubt Trump’s base loved that humiliation. But will the press ever learn? By the time the media figures out that its addiction to BREAKING NEWS is a standing invitation to be punked, the guy who’s gaming them may be sitting in the Oval Office.

I do see signs that Trump’s press bullying is losing octane. The Los Angeles Times’ lead story out of that birther event was headlined, “Trump trades one falsehood for two more,” and the New York Times led with “Trump Gives Up a Lie But Refuses to Repent.” If cable news covers the debates that unflinchingly, maybe Bed Bath & Beyond can let its inventory of waterproof bedding dwindle.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet. Marty Kaplan is the Norman Lear professor of entertainment, media and society at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Reach him at martyk@jewishjournal.com.

IMAGE: Republican U.S. presidential candidate Trump shows off the size of his hands as Fox News Channel moderators Bret Baier and Megyn Kelly look on at the U.S. Republican presidential candidates debate in Detroit on March 3, 2016.

Trump: I Won’t Yell Out Curse Words As President

Trump: I Won’t Yell Out Curse Words As President

It has come to this.

In an interview Tuesday with NBC News, conducted some time before the polls closed in New Hampshire, Donald Trump sounded as if he was telling Lester Holt that he would stop being the obscenity-spewing carnival maestro that people have come to recognize — once he’s actually elected president, that is.

The interview came after Trump gladly repeated a vulgar heckle against one of his main rivals, Ted Cruz. A woman shouted out at a Trump campaign event New Hampshire that Cruz was a “pussy.”

“I’m wondering to myself,” Lester Holt asked, “would you say that as president of the United States—”

“No,” Trump interrupted.

“—with that seal on that podium?”

“Much different, much different.”

“So are you gonna be a different guy as president than the one we see on air?” Holt responded.

Trump then reminded everyone of his high-class background — and his high-class genetics.

“I went to the best school, I had — you know, I was a good student. I have an uncle who was, you know, one of the top, top professors at MIT,” he explained. “I mean, There’s a good gene pool right there. I have to do what I have to do, right?”

“So is this an act?”

“No, it’s not an act. Last night I had thousands of people. We had a great time. And it wasn’t my word, it was a word that a woman kept shouting,” Trump said. “And she was shouting it — and I repeated, I only repeated the word — and the place was wild. A standing ovation, everybody loved it.”

“But that doesn’t mean it was in good taste.”

“No, but I’ll tell you what: When you’re president, or you’re about to be president, you would act differently.”

To give some context here: Trump and his audience were inspired to insult Cruz because the Texas senator isn’t fierce enough in advocating a return to waterboarding and other forms of torture.