Fact checks prevailed during and after the Biden-Trump debate — but not for real-time viewers

NEW YORK — There have been some exhaustive and independent fact checks of the claims made during CNN debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The problem is that none of them were available to the millions of people watching the two presidents in real time.

This was the result of CNN decision ahead of Thursday’s debate that moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper would be questioners, not referees. President Biden’s supporters were frustrated as Trump was subsequently called out for more misleading statements than his rival, and this served to place greater emphasis on the Democrat’s tepid performance.

At the same time, it highlighted a conundrum that the media has yet to resolve, after nine years of Trump operating in the public arena, as it relates to the presidency.

“I think there is a very real question about whether it is possible to fact-check Donald Trump on live television,” said Jane Hall, author of “Politics and the Media: Intersections and New Directions” and professor of journalism at American University. “He confused a lot of different formats.”

Just under 48 million people watched the unusual debate in June, according to a preliminary estimate from the company Nielsen. The first time these candidates met on stage in 2020, there were 73 million viewers.

Bash and Tapper remained firm in their intentions, which CNN emphasized was its decision and not part of the debate rules negotiated with the campaign. Journalists avoided follow-ups, even though they had to repeat questions several times when candidates ignored them.

CNN Daniel Dal offered a report in which he said Trump made at least 30 false allegations and Biden made at least nine. But it didn’t air until more than an hour after the debate ended — just before midnight on the East Coast.

“I wish CNN moderators would do more fact-checking, letting the public know when things are said that are completely false,” The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote on X. “I’m not sure how that helps a platform broadcast falsehoods disguised as facts.”

Bill Adair, professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University who founded Polyfactsaid it is extraordinarily difficult to balance on-air corrections with the need to keep a conversation going.

That said, “I think their complete silence went too far,” said Adair, who is no longer affiliated with Politifact. When Trump falsely claimed during a discussion about abortion that Democrats supported killing live babies, one of the moderators should have intervened, he said.

CNN was unrepentant and pleased with Bash and Tapper’s performance. “Like in a big game, when no one talks about the referees the next day, we did our job,” said one executive privately.

The debate went well as a television production, especially compared to the first debate of 2020 which moderator Chris Wallace recalled Thursday as a “disaster” and a Ill-conceived Trump Town Hall in 2023, this was a factor in the firing of then-CNN chief Chris Licht.

It’s not that Biden hasn’t challenged Trump’s statements; he did at least 10 times, according to the debate transcript.

“You’re lying,” Biden told Trump during a discussion about abortion. “Every single thing he said was a lie, every single one of them,” he said of the veterans. “What he’s telling you is simply not true,” he said of the Capitol insurrection. “He has no idea what the hell he’s talking about,” he said when the subject came to NATO. “It’s simply a lie,” he said of Trump in Ukraine.

And there was Biden’s familiar line: “I’ve never heard so much bullshit in my life.”

However, statements often lacked specificity and a feeling of missed opportunity persisted. Biden “missed every fastball that was hovering at the plate,” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said Friday.

Polyfact pointed 15 false statements made by Trump and another – that Biden had allowed millions of people to illegally enter the country from prisons and psychiatric institutions – which he classified as a “pants on fire” lie. He cited three false statements by Biden.

The New York Times narrated 20 false statements by Trump, with another 21 found to be misleading, without context or without evidence. Their fact check found no false statements by Biden, with 11 meeting the other characterizations. The Associated Press adjusted 11 Trump statements by Trump, four by Biden.

The Washington Post wrote this Trump “confidently relied on false claims that have been repeatedly debunked,” while Biden “has occasionally exaggerated the truth.”

Some journalists, like Dale, fact-checked online during the debate, but this required viewers to pay attention specifically to a second screen. Adair noted that at Duke, educators have experimented with ways to fact-check television screens in real time, but automated efforts have largely failed and those led by humans require great speed.

Duke conducted an experiment with on-screen fact-checking at a North Carolina television station in 2020, he said.

So far, he said, he has seen little interest among television networks in doing something similar this election cycle.

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David Bauder writes about media for the Associated Press. Follow him on http://twitter.com/dbauder.