‘That Was Just Terrible’: Chris Wallace Dings Debate Moderators For Fact-Checking Trump and Vance

CNN’s Chris Wallace , who has moderated two presidential debates in his career, had some words of criticism for the way debate moderators this election cycle fact-checked both JD Vance and Donald Trump .

The issue of fact-checking has been at the heart of numerous contentious moments in the debates this year. In his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris , Trump was checked a handful of times by ABC moderators. During the vice presidential debate on CBS, Vance had a fiery exchange with the moderators after being fact-checked. His microphone, along with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s , were eventually muted to restore order.

During an interview with Mediaite editor in chief Aidan McLaughlin , Wallace explained his his that fact-checking should be the the responsibility of the candidates:

The moment when they had been talking about Springfield, Ohio, and the question was whether the Haitian immigrants were there legally or illegally, and Margaret Brennan , whom I have great regard for, tried to fact-check Vance. And then Vance said, no, you’re wrong and wanted to argue with her about it, and they cut off the mics. I winced. I thought that was just terrible. And I must say, I took some heat when I said I wasn’t going to fact-check. This was 2016, it was eight years ago, but in terms of our feeling about lies and just shameless misrepresentations on the stage, this was before Trump had become president, yes, he was running, but he hadn’t become president, it feels like it was a much more innocent time than where we’ve gone in the last eight years. I think my saying at that time, I’m not going to fact-check stands up pretty well, because you look at what happened with ABC where they backtracked. You look at what happened with CBS. It’s a very slippery slope.

I guess I really still feel like the obligation is on the other candidate. And the difference is that the other candidate in 2016 was Hillary Clinton . And I, one, had no doubts that she would be able to figure out for herself what she wanted to contest. In the Trump- Biden debate in June, the problem was Biden was incapable of fact-checking, and that creates a different issue. But this is probably going to be controversial, what I’m going to say, I think that the moderator’s fact-checking sometimes feels to me like virtue signaling. It’s like, I’m going to puff myself up. What you’re going to fact-check, what you’re not going to fact-check, who you’re going to fact-check or not. There was one point in the ABC debate where Trump had said, well, I lost, and David Muir asked him about it, and Trump said, I was being sarcastic. And Muir then said, well, it didn’t seem to me you were sarcastic. Really? Now we’re going to fact-check on whether a guy was being sarcastic or serious.

Wallace then explained why he believes presidential debates should be treated like prize fights:

When I did my first debate, I sat down with Jim Lehrer , who was the king of presidential debates. He did 12 of them. There was one election cycle because, at that point, the Commission on Presidential Debates didn’t dictate, which it did in our case, who the moderators were going to be. It still had to be negotiated with the campaigns. And the only one that the two campaigns could agree on was Jim Lehrer. So he ended up moderating all three presidential debates. And Lehrer said to me, we had lunch before I did my first debate in 2016, and he said, you got to understand, it’s not about you, it’s not about the moderator. And if at the end of the debate, people say, that was a great debate, was there even a moderator there, that’s a success. Like a prizefight, God, that was a great fight, did they even have a referee in the ring with them? So at any point where you become the story in a presidential debate or a vice presidential debate, I think you’ve failed.

Watch the full episode here .