President Joe Biden and Republican Donald Trump went right to mixing it up on policy — and each other — in their first presidential debate of the 2024 campaign.FILE _ CNN’s Dana Bash, left, and Jake Tapper listen as they moderate a presidential debate between President Joe Biden and Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump, Thursday, June 27, 2024, in Atlanta.
“I think that there is a very real question about whether it is possible to fact-check Donald Trump live on television,” said Jane Hall, author of “Politics and the Media: Intersections and New Directions” and an American University journalism professor. “He has confounded many different formats.”Just under 48 million people watched the unusual June debate, according to a preliminary estimate by the Nielsen company.
“I wish the CNN moderators did more fact-checking, letting the audience know when things are said that are flatly false,” columnist Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times wrote on X. “Not sure how it helps for a platform to transmit falsehoods disguised as facts.”That said, “for them to be completely silent, I think, was going too far,” said Adair, who is no longer affiliated with Politifact.