The Debate Moderators Failed Us

Seth Masket: “Now, there’s a longstanding norm that presidential debate moderators aren’t supposed to do fact-checking in real time. This is something Candy Crowley got in trouble for back in 2012. And there’s some good reason for that — it’s not a very useful debate if a candidate is just arguing with a moderator about whether an event happened or not.”

“But the lack of fact-checking was probably more problematic tonight. Even a very skilled public speaker would have had a very hard time refuting all of Trump’s false statements and still getting in some points of his own. And Biden wasn’t that kind of speaker.”