A License to Lie

A danger to democracy

We’re still two days away from JD Vance and Tim Walz taking the stage in a New York studio for the vice-presidential debate. But we already apparently have a winner and a loser.

In the victorious column, we have mendacity. And, sadly, the loser is likely to be the truth, and by extension American democracy. 

CBS News, which is hosting the debate, has announced that its moderators won’t fact-check the candidates in real time. Instead, the network plans to track the truth through social media posts, live blogs, and post-debate analysis. They’ve also said the moderators will be “facilitating those opportunities” for candidates to fact-check each other.

That’s a bit like saying firefighters should wait until the house has burned to the ground before picking up the hose—or, at best, suggesting the residents form their own bucket brigade. This approach is woefully insufficient and downright dangerous.

In the last presidential debate on ABC News we saw the moderators effectively stepping up at strategic moments to set the record straight. That it was Trump who was spewing the manure and getting called out, led to inevitable whining of bias from him and his acolytes—a reaction as predictable as his inability to tell the truth. CNN, on the other hand, in the first debate between Biden and Trump, was content to let the litany of lies pile up with nary a squeak. It was not a good look for the moderators, the network, or what it meant for the future of this country. 

I got my start at CBS News. It is where I learned to be a journalist. I remember spending hours going over a few lines of a script or a segment of an interview transcript with my mentor, the late, great Michael Rosenbaum. We would go word by word, parsing each one for how to most accurately reflect the set of facts at the heart of our reporting. Many a late night and weekend was spent following a dictum I heard from my long-time friend and colleague Dan Rather: The job of a journalist is to get as close to the truth as is humanly possible.

I have no doubt that this tradition remains strong among the wonderful people who work at CBS News. And I don’t want to pick on this network alone. The American press has been bullied for years by Trump and much of the Republican Party to treat facts and fact-checking as a partisan exercise. It’s asymmetric warfare meant for only one result: Use the fog of the rhetorical battlefield to degrade reality to such a degree that anyone who tries to step up and decry the deceit will feel the wrath of the MAGA hordes and its petulant leader.

To be sure, almost all politicians stretch the truth now and again to make their points. But there’s a vast difference between selectively framing statistics or glossing over nuance to craft a more favorable story, and outright denying the results of a free and fair election—or fueling xenophobia and racism with absurd conspiracy theories about immigrants eating pets. 

We have never seen a presidential candidate so unmoored from reality who pays so little a price for his incessant falsehoods. Lies aren’t an aspect of Trump’s campaign. Lies are his campaign. Take them away and you have nothing. If anything, Vance, Trump’s Mini-Me, is just as bad. You could say he is motivated by craven power calculations but that only makes him more dangerous. 

I dearly hope that CBS changes its mind under pressure. Or that the fixes they point to work out better than I fear. But already serious damage has been done. One of the greatest services a free press can offer is that it serves as a deterrent to the excesses of power. It is what causes a little voice in the mind of a politician ready to overstep the bounds of acceptable behavior to wonder whether he or she will get caught. But there must be consequences to keep craven narcissists and those without a moral compass in line. 

Think about what CBS’s announcement means for Vance and how he will approach Tuesday’s showdown. Think about all the lessons Trump and the ranks of the MAGA minions have learned from a pliant press. 

Keeping them honest is not doing the Democrats’ work. It’s fulfilling a constitutional role for the American people. Walz should be free to make a positive case to the American people. Fact checking is essential if we want to elevate our political discourse. 

A more perfect union is impossible in a nation inundated in lies.