Should the moderators have done more fact-checking?

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Democrats across the country are repeating the same four words after President Biden’s debate performance Thursday night: We have a problem. But it wasn’t just Biden who flopped; the moderators also failed to provide any sort of check on former president Donald Trump’s lies.

So I asked my Post Opinions colleagues Eugene Robinson and Erik Wemple: Was the debate mishandled?

Alexi McCammond: Was it a mistake for CNN not to fact-check the candidates?

Eugene Robinson: I think so. The idea was for Biden and Trump to fact-check one another, but I wonder whether that was a choice or a cop-out — a surrender to the difficulty of fact-checking Trump in real time and how correcting his lies would have consumed most of the debate.

Alexi: I think they abdicated any sort of journalistic duties by not even pushing back on some of Trump’s blatantly false claims. They normalized his falsehoods by responding with “Thank you, Mr. President.”

Eugene: The result........

© Washington Post