‘We are really hoping to get these candidates off their canned talking points’ — a conversation with GOP debate moderator Elizabeth Vargas
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While NewsNation may be unfamiliar to many Americans, viewers of Wednesday night’s GOP debate on that upstart cable network will likely recognize one of its star personalities.
Elizabeth Vargas, who is moderating the Dec. 6 presidential primary debate along with talk-show host Megyn Kelly and journalist Eliana Johnson, is a veteran broadcast journalist whose resume include stints on ABC’s “20/20” and “World News Tonight.” She also was the host of “America’s Most Wanted” on Fox and “A&E Investigates,” among other shows.
Her decision to join NewsNation in April made headlines, as the network was largely unknown even though it had launched more than two years earlier promising serious, objective journalism.
Kelly has called Vargas “a consummate professional,” and she is widely seen as such, having won both Emmy and Peabody awards for her news coverage. She has also been praised for opening up about her struggles with alcoholism and anxiety, detailed in her 2016 book “Between Breaths.”
A single mother with two sons, Vargas, 61, lives in New York City, where she has been preparing for Wednesday’s debate over Zoom with her co-hosts, in between doing her own show (“Elizabeth Vargas Reports” airs weekdays at 4 p.m. MST) and recovering from a bad cold.
She recently spoke with Deseret about how NewsNation came to take center stage in the fourth GOP debate, how she and the other hosts plan to keep control of the conversation, and how she believes the media can win back the American public’s trust.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Deseret News: How and when did you get the invitation to moderate the debate? Did you know about it in advance or did it come as a surprise?
Elizabeth Vargas: A lot of us with all the different networks had met with the RNC last spring to pitch a proposal. I wasn’t entirely surprised; I knew we were in the running for quite some time but I was very, very excited to learn that we were actually getting a chance to do it. We found out after the second debate.
DN: Have you ever moderated a debate before, and how are you preparing for it?
EV: I have not. I’ve done lots of live interviewing during my career, had lots of big interviews, at the White House and in the Oval Office, but not a debate, so this is first for me, and I’m really excited.
There isn’t a lot that’s different about prepping for a debate and prepping for a big interview. What is different is the format, because there’s a very strict format for these debates that you have to keep in mind. ... We want to encourage these candidates to debate each other, but it’s like when you interview the president of the United States, you’re always given a certain amount of time, and almost always, precisely when that time is up, they will step in and say, interview’s over. So you’re doing a constant calculation.
It precludes what I call an interviewing fishing expedition, where you follow that thread and see where that leads you because sometimes it leads to gold, and something unexpected and therefore wonderful. You really don’t have the chance to do that in a moderated debate. There are strict rules about timing, and it’s supposed to be equal.
DN: Did you watch the Ron DeSantis-Gavin Newsom debate on Dec. 7?
EV: Yes. And I deserve a gold medal for sticking with it. (Laughs.)
I will just say that it’s very easy to armchair quarterback and criticize somebody for failing to keep control of a dynamic environment. That was certainly a dynamic environment. It’s a harder job than it looks, but that’s why Sean’s (Hannity) paid the big bucks.
What you can control — and this is what we’ve been working so hard on — are the questions. Open-ended questions invite generic, generalized responses, and we are hoping in this fourth debate to really get these candidates off their canned talking points and into more specificity on their policy positions. What would you do on the border? How would that work? How quickly could that happen? Is that legal? How much would that cost? Is that possible?
They’ve all talked really tough on the southern border, and they’ve all gotten away with just saying really sweeping statements ... well, I’ll seal the southern border on Day 1. Really? How does work exactly? That’s one thing we can work on in advance.
DN: Megyn Kelly said some flattering things about you on the day this was announced. Have the two of you met?
EV: Yes, our sons were at the same school when she lived in the city; we’d see each other on parent curricula night. She’s now moved out to suburbs.
Related
DN: NewsNation seems to have come out of nowhere; when did it first get on your radar screen, and what went through your mind when you were thinking about joining the network?
EV: We are a brand-spanking-new cable news network. We’re thrilled to have this opportunity and to introduce millions of viewers to NewsNation for the first time. We do great work. It’s a network that caters to the moderate majority in the middle that have been largely ignored by the cable networks out there which cater to the more extreme positions on the far right or far left. And we’re very proud of the position we’ve staked in the middle.
It was about a year ago that I had lunch with Perry Sook (chairman/CEO of Nexstar Media Group), the leader of this expedition and grand experiment, and he said, “How’d you like to be part of the last great adventure in television news?” and I thought, you know, what, I think I’d like to be part of it.
It’s something I’d never done before; I’ve never done cable news. But more importantly, I’d done several years doing documentaries and doing my syndicated show and the chance to jump back in and do daily news coverage in such a historic news cycle. My gosh, there’s so much going on the world that is massively important and historically resonate, and to be able to cover that, day in and day out, is so much fun. And I’m really proud of our little team. He is right: this is the last great adventure in television news, and it’s a small but mighty team of people, and we’re tremendously excited for this opportunity.
DN: Given the plummeting levels of trust in the media, do you have any advice on how journalists and media companies can regain the trust of Americans?
EV: This is a very polarized time right now, but it’s not the first time we’ve been through this. I think right now the information space is so crowded, with all sorts of people and groups on social media who may look like ‘media’ and are nothing of the sort. We as journalists just have to continue to do our job well, and that means do what we’re trained to do, which means find all the information you can, make sure you are double-sourced; we have producers and lawyers and standards people and all these other people checking our work to see that what we say is true and accurate and fair, and takes into account all the context — these are things that you do not see on these blogs, or these posts that people put on social media that are basically just thoughts in their head.
I think all we can do is continue to do our job well. I really hope that more and more schools and colleges in our country include classes on information literacy. People need to understand that just because you read it or see something on TikTok or Facebook doesn’t make it true. I’m constantly telling my boys, when they come to me saying they saw something on Facebook: well, who said it? And how do you know they know that? Because it’s really important right now, in this hyper-polarized environment where people weaponize not just information, but misinformation, to be really, really careful.
The Dec. 6 GOP presidential primary debate in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, will begin at 6 p.m. MST and air on NewsNation and SiriusXM. It will also be available on NewsNation’s website and app. People who want to find out if NewsNation is part of their cable package can check here.
