From sane-washing to facts-optional debates, news
outlets like CBS News are failing us
By Jennifer Schulze –
9/30/24
Can you “hear it
now?” It’s the deafening sound of CBS News abdicating its core
responsibility as a news organization.
Opting for their own odd idea of fairness over anyone’s
idea of truth, the home of news legends like Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow
and Dan Rather is now outsourcing the job of holding candidates to the truth to
the candidates themselves in Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate. I have no
doubt Tim Walz will be able to call out JD Vance when Vance repeats
his admitted lie about his very own Springfield, Ohio constituents
eating household pets. But making Walz do so further undermines what’s left of
journalism credibility just as it creates a false equivalency between lies and
truth.
This is a gross surrender of a key journalism
function: to seek
truth and to report it. CBS is telling us that facts do
not matter enough to include them in the marquee debate event on broadcast
television. Instead, CBS says it’s created a two-tier system that’ll work just
fine: a debate over here, and fact-checking over there.
“We see the debate and our coverage as two distinct
areas,” said
Claudia Milne, head of a newfangled CBS unit called “CBS
Confirmed” that’s dedicated to… wait for it… fact-checking.
You read that correctly. The head of fact-checking at CBS
News says that fact-checking is something distinct from news coverage. If
viewers do insist on “context, analysis and fact-checking,” they can just hop
over to the network’s website, where CBS will be live blogging about the
debate. Wow.
With that ridiculous plan, why have debate moderators at
all? News anchors Nora O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan will be nothing more than
window dressing as they read questions and ignore the lies pretending to be
answers.
“The CBS no fact checking rule isn’t the fault of the
moderators but it’s Marg Brennan and Nora O’Donnell whose reputations will take
a hit. They are props in the CBS lazy and cowardly approach to journalism,”
said Washington Post columnist Jennifer
Rubin. She’s right. Why would any serious journalist agree to be
part of something like that?
Former ABC News correspondent Chris
Bury adds: “This is insulting to viewers when @abc anchors David
Muir and Linsey Davis showed they could fact-check ‘they’re eating the dogs,
they’re eating cats’ and other lies in a crisp, clear fashion without
interrupting the flow of the debate. Come on @CBSNews do better.”
Media critic Margaret
Sullivan agrees: “After seeing ABC’s David Muir and Linsey
Davis do it effectively in the presidential debate, I find it not only
disappointing but unworthy of the network of the late Walter Cronkite, who at
one time was known as the most trusted man in America.”
Here’s a simple fact: You cannot rightly call yourself a
news organization if you willingly give up on the truth. So why did CBS News
decide to follow the CNN model of “let the lies fly” and not the more
journalistically sound ABC News way? Most likely, the Trump-MAGA
uproar over ABC’s measly four fact=checks had something to do with
it.
It’s been a long-time Republican political strategy to
falsely attack mainstream media coverage as biased and unfair. After Kamala
Harris soundly defeated Trump in the September presidential debate, that
strategy was laser-focused on ABC. This was a typical response
from MAGA: “Remove ABC’s broadcast license and criminally charge
the moderators and executives for campaign finance fraud.”
So were these types of threats behind CBS’s outrageous
decision to implement “do-it-yourself” fact-checking? If so, it’s another sign
that the right-wing effort to “work the refs” is effective. Throughout this
campaign, we’ve seen the media
bend — and now finally break — to accommodate Trump. Most
recently, there’s been an outbreak of sane-washing, where
news outlets ignore Trump’s rally gibberish in an effort to make him sound more
normal.
This latest move by CBS News is a neutered and cowardly
play, not the independent voice America’s founders fought so hard to protect.
It’s truly nauseating to see such a storied news organization fall so far.
Maybe the debate moderators will surprise us and break rank with CBS management
on Tuesday night, but that’s about as likely as JD Vance telling the truth.
Jennifer Schulze is a Chicago journalist reporting on
journalism. Follow Jennifer on Threads @newsjennifer_schulze or
Twitter/X @NewsJennifer.
