CNN Slammed for Letting Trump Lie Through Entire Debate

During Thursday night’s astonishingly bad presidential debate, Trump sprinted through a cascade of lies, half-truths, and misinformation with no pushback from CNN debate moderators Jake Tapper or Dana Bash. In lieu of challenging Trump’s lies, Tapper and Bash instead stuck to keeping candidates within their time limits, only pushing back against an answer when a candidate (Trump) failed to answer the question at all.

“The absence of real-time fact checking is the biggest failure of this debate,” wrote NBC News and MSNBC contributor Anthony Coley, arguing that CNN was “not meeting the moment.”

“How are none of the moderators fact checking this post-birth abortion nonsense??” Kate Smith, senior director of news for Planned Parenthood, fumed in response to Trump’s disturbing spew of anti-abortion disinformation, according to The Washington Post (her account is now private).

CNN’s political director David Chalian defended the tactic ahead of the debate, telling The Washington Post, “The venue of a presidential debate between these two candidates is not the ideal venue for a live fact-checking exercise.”

Lawyer and civil rights activist Olayemi Olurin largely agreed with CNN’s assessment, pointing out that, “It’s actually not the moderator’s job to ‘pick up the slack’ for the candidate who’s not doing a good enough job responding to or checking their opponent in the debate. That’s not impartial or the role of a moderator because they’d then be a part of the debate.”

“It is a failure on CNN not to fact check Trump’s lies but the thing is…if Joe Biden were performing the way he’s supposed to in a debate, his answers would be the fact-check,” Olurin noted during the debate. “So 3 things are true: Trump is lying his ass off, the [moderator] isn’t doing their job & neither is Biden.”

Regardless, the lack of real-time fact-checking was a boon for Trump, who nonsensically asserted Nancy Pelosi claimed responsibility for the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, raged against “post-birth abortions,” which are not a thing, and blamed Biden for both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel as Biden fumbled to push back. The only time Biden really went toe-to-toe with Trump’s claims was when Trump challenged his golf handicap and the two derailed the debate to argue about golf.

CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale had earlier sent Trump supporters into a tizzy after posting that he’d be fact-checking the debate live, but that tizzy was soon quashed. Following the bungled debate, Dale reportedly got just three minutes out of all of CNN’s post-debate coverage to go over the mountain of lies Trump spewed.