Commission on Presidential Debates: Don’t expect moderators to be 'fact checkers'
Viewers tuning in Tuesday night may anticipate moderator Chris Wallace to fact check the candidates in real time, but the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) attempted to manage those expectations over the weekend.
"There's a vast difference between being a moderator in a debate and being a reporter who is interviewing someone," CPD co-chair Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr. said Sunday on CNN. "We don't expect Chris or our other moderators to be fact checkers. The minute the TV is off, there are going to be plenty of fact checkers in every newspaper and every television station in the world. That's not the role, the main role, of our moderators."
Wallace -- who received widespread praise for moderating the third and final 2016 debate between Trump and Clinton -- also said Sunday on Fox News that his job as a moderator is "to be as invisible as possible."
"I'm trying to get them to engage, to focus on the key issues, to give people at home a sense of, 'why I want to vote for one versus the other,'" Wallace said.
