‘We Blew It!’ CNN Journo Blasts Lack Of Fact-Checking At Debate ‘Debacle’

Critics of CNN’s presidential debate include one veteran CNN journalist who told Mediaite the lack of fact-checking was “a debacle” and a Biden campaign ally who said CNN may never recover from the embarrassment.

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump finally went head-to-head at CNN’s debate Thursday night in the earliest general election presidential matchup ever, and the reviews are in. After some deadly early stumbles , President Biden’s performance improved, but not enough to ward off abject panic from some Democrats , and calls for him to drop out .

Those calls to drop out have become the most intense story to emerge from the debate, but CNN also came under intense criticism over their execution of the decision not to have moderators fact-check the candidates.

In a pre-debate interview, CNN political director David Chalian left open the possibility that moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash might call out major whoppers — “if there is some egregious mistruth put forward, Jake and Dana certainly have the ability to quickly correct the record and move on,” he told The Washington Post — but that didn’t pan out on the debate stage Thursday night.

Instead, Trump was able to fire a barrage of falsehoods and misleading claims that the Biden campaign pegged at 50 “lies” and CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale tallied at “well over 30” in the hour after the debate. None of those statements were challenged by the moderators.

Neither were the nine statements from President Biden that Dale identified — which included a notation that Trump’s statements about treating COVID with bleach weren’t framed “as advice to people.”

One veteran CNN journalist told Mediaite that the failure to even try to fact-check was shocking, saying “We blew it” and that the debate “was a total debacle. There should have been some fact-checking.”

A Democrat close to the Biden campaign tore into CNN in comments to Mediaite:

CNN should be embarrassed. They decided to put two robots on stage to allow Donald Trump to spew lie after lie after lie. If the journalists moderating had no intention of telling their audience the truth, might as well just have random tv hosts. Jake and Dana are good journalists, but they were not journalists last night. They were statues who humiliated their profession and who should be furious at their employer for not allowing them to do their job. Which they objectively didn’t. Not. Once. I don’t know how they ever recover and are taken seriously again.

Fact-checking “in real time,” as Chalian described it, has never been attempted at a presidential debate, but the false claim that Democrats support murdering babies after they’re born, for example, would seem to have met the bar that Chalian set for live correction.

A CNN spokesperson defended the debate in a statement to Mediate, saying “We are very proud of Jake and Dana. Our job was to make sure candidates were heard so voters can make informed decisions and we are pleased we were able to do that.”