No drug tests or fact checking...
Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, who will moderate Tuesday night’s first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, will not be tasked with fact-checking the candidates in real time, the co-chair of the debate commission has confirmed.
“We don’t expect Chris or our other moderators to be fact checkers,” Frank Fahrenkopf, co-chair of the non-partisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), said Sunday on CNN’s Reliable Sources. “The minute the TV is off there will be plenty of fact checkers.”
He added: “When we choose moderators, we make very clear to them that there’s a vast difference between being a moderator in a debate and being a reporter who is interviewing someone. When you’re interviewing someone, if they say something that is in direct opposition to something they said a week ago, your duty is to follow up and say, wait a minute, you didn’t say that a week ago. But that’s not the case in the debate. If one of these candidates says something on the stage Tuesday, it’s the role of the other person in a debate to be the one to raise that and say, wait a minute, you’re changing the position and so forth rather than the moderator.”
Fahrenkopf went on to say the CPD would not comply with Trump’s demand – which he reiterated in a tweet on Sunday morning – that both candidates be drug-tested before Tuesday’s meeting.
“One of my daughters is a doctor and I’m sure she doesn’t want me taking anybody’s drug test,” Fahrenkopf said. “So, no, that’s not – that’s not within our bailiwick that the commission is going to do or consider.”
www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2020/sep/27/donald-trump-amy-coney-barrett-supreme-court-debate-joe-biden-latest-updates?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other