I watched ABC FAKE NEWS this morning, both lightweight reporter Jonathan Carl’s(K?) ridiculous and biased interview of Tom Cotton (who was fantastic!), and their so-called Panel of Trump Haters, and I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?
Who’s surprised he’s trying to chicken out?
How would real-time fact checking even work? Would the moderators actually do their job for once and call it out, or would they just do little VH1/“Pop Up Video”-style graphics where they would highlight whether they would try to correct the record on certain things being said?
Here’s my proposal.
During each candidate’s first turn to speak, no fact checks are shown, but the fact checkers will use the other candidate’s turn to come up with corrections. Then when it’s the first candidate’s turn again, the start of that their speaking time is used to read the corrections from their previous statement. If the corrections take the whole speaking slot, too bad so sad.
Hopefully both, and there’s a Lie-O-Meter that determines how truthful a statement is as its being read, and then a counter of provably false statements made
Not like a here is a one in a billion outlier so the truth is a lie. If crime is down, but up in a small, specific area, the statement “crime is down” would be true.
It’d be nice if there was some sort of objective, quantitative “score” that could be attached to each candidate’s performance (or as objective as it can be). Something at the end of the night you could point to and be like, “Yeah, they’re a goddamn liar-mouth.” Something either candidate could point to as a “win” without resorting to just soundbites that get blasted the whole week after and people are like, “Oh snap, they said that!” Like, an actual way to tell how honest either candidate seemed during their “performance”. I’m sure Trump would lie his ass off and his base would be like, “Well of course ABC is going to say Trump lied, they’re owned by woke Disney!”, but at the very least we’d have some sort of tracking of how much they lied during a debate.
Would the moderators actually do their job for once and call it out
That’s actually not the job of moderators. This idea that moderators should do fact-checking only came about in 2016 because of Trump.
The network probably should have a team of fact-checkers. But fact checking in real time isn’t easy.
I would like to have the moderators do anything at all, though, that would be nice. Like cut off a candidate who goes over time. Maybe force candidates to answer the question asked or forfeit their time.
