SULLIVAN
for what they should do in these extraordinarily important debates:
Maintain control. Good luck with this, of course, but it’s of paramount importance. The moderators have to walk a careful line; they should not become the story, but somebody has to be in charge. If not the moderator, it will be the candidates, particularly Trump, who is so dominant in his demeanor.
Be well-prepared enough to assert the truth in real time. Wallace, who’ll moderate the last debate — just two weeks before the election — has already said he doesn’t see his role as fact-checking, otherwise known as calling the candidates on their lies.
“I’m not there to truth-squad,” he told his colleague, Howard Kurtz. That was surprising because Wallace can be a very tough and effective interviewer; I hope he’ll change his mind. If journalists aren’t interested in being part of the truth squad, they should find another sport.
They can get some help with this, through some real-time fact-checking by the networks airing the debates. We’ve seen some from cable networks during the campaign in those bottom-of-the-screen captions known as chyrons. (“He’s not,” said one of them when Trump insisted President Barack Obama was the founder of ISIS.) More of this, please!
Be willing, and able, to stop the candidates in their tracks. Candidates always wander off the subject in an effort to stay on message, and the moderators need to lasso them right back to where they should be.
Set clear guidelines at the start and hold the candidates to them. Lauer tried this, to no avail, when he said he didn’t want the candidates attacking each other. They did. Let’s try that kind of thing again, with more follow-through and a stiffer spine.
Be willing to pursue a logical line of questioning, with repeated follow-up questions. James Fallows of the Atlantic magazine, whose just-published cover story looks ahead to the debates and back to other notable presidential debate moments, says this kind of persistence should not be confused with tough-talk showboating.
“It’s so easy to think that sounding tough is the same as being clear,” he told me. “It’s important not to mistake hostility of tone for relentlessness of logic.”
He noted that Chris Matthews of MSNBC did this well when he interviewed Trump about his abortion beliefs a few months ago. It ended up making news because Matthews pressed Trump until he became more specific: He said women who seek abortions should be subject to “some form of punishment” if the procedure were to be banned.
It’s not easy to do this job well, and it may never have been tougher than in this election cycle. But despite Trump’s ardent wishes, it’s imperative that the moderators rise to the challenge.