"Bias" Of Debate Moderators In Their Own Words

Usually, I don’t waste much time watching the presidential or vice-presidential debates; but on Tuesday I watched most of the vice-presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. I applaud Vance on a skilled performance. But I particularly want to comment today on the overt hostility that Vance faced from the moderators, which is unfortunately typical of the hostility of the corporate media toward all Republican candidates.

If you watched some or all of the debate, you probably came away with a general impression of the moderators attempting to help Walz; but without a transcript it is difficult to remember specifics. Fortunately, CBS has produced a transcript of the debate. So I thought it might be informative to go through the transcript and compile some of the more absurd efforts of the moderators to give a boost to Walz. The moderators in this instance were Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan of CBS. What becomes noticeable when you do this is the extent to which the moderators insert into their questions contested, or even clearly false, Democratic Party talking points as if they were uncontested facts.

The second topic of questioning in the debate, introduced by moderator O’Donnell, was stated to be “Hurricane Helene,” which she used as a proxy for supposed climate change. Here is the text of the introductory question:

Let's turn now to Hurricane Helene. The storm could become one of the deadliest on record. More than 160 people are dead and hundreds more are missing. Scientists say climate change makes these hurricanes larger, stronger and more deadly because of the historic rainfall. Senator Vance, according to CBS News polling, seven in ten Americans and more than 60% of Republicans under the age of 45 favor the U.S. taking steps to try and reduce climate change. Senator, what responsibility would the Trump administration have to try and reduce the impact of climate change?

O’Donnell takes her opportunity as moderator to assert as uncontested fact that “scientists say climate change makes these hurricanes larger, stronger and more deadly.” In fact, the idea that climate change is making hurricanes worse is one of the most clearly false and thoroughly debunked of all the scary claims of the climate scam. On Thursday, Gregory Wrightstone, Executive Director of the CO2 Coalition, went on the Daily Signal podcast to give an extensive refutation of the claim. The link has both video and a transcript. From the transcript:

I’m using data from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, from NASA, even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change disagrees with her. They all say that there’s been no increase in the big hurricanes. . . . [G]oing back to 1850, we know every single hurricane that’s made landfall since 1850, because they’re hard to miss. And land-falling hurricanes in the United States have been declining. I’ve looked at that data myself. . . . If you look at the U.N. data, go right to the source, and they show clearly that extreme or natural disasters have been declining by 10% since 2000.

As to Helene being “one of the deadliest [hurricanes] on record,” on October 2, CBS itself compiled a list of the top ten deadliest historical U.S. hurricanes (maybe in a failed attempt to support O’Donnell’s assertion). It turns out that Helene has a long way to go even to make it into the top ten. Helene’s current death toll (per AP at 9:30 tonight) is 237. The number one deadliest Hurricane was the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, with a death toll given as between 8000 and 12,000. Other hurricanes with death tolls over 1000 occurred in 2017, 1928, 2005, and 1893. Others with death tolls of 400 and up occurred in 1881, 1957, 1935, and 1856. How this proves that hurricanes are becoming more deadly due to increasing strength in recent years is a mystery to anyone who looks at the data.

At the end of about 10 minutes of the candidates responding to O’Donnell’s opening question, she closed the topic with the following statement, again asserted as if it was an uncontested fact: “The overwhelming consensus among scientists is that the earth's climate is warming at an unprecedented rate.” Neither candidate was given an opportunity to respond, the the debate moved on to other topics.

The next instance of the moderators explicitly taking Walz’s side occurred a few minutes later, when the topic was illegal immigration. During his answer on the subject, Vance had said “[I]n Springfield, Ohio and in communities all across this country, you've got schools that are overwhelmed, you've got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.” After Walz had responded, moderator Brennan interjected:

[J]ust to clarify for our viewers, Springfield, Ohio does have a large number of Haitian migrants who have legal status.

This interjection came despite an agreement on a ground rule that the moderators would not “fact check” the debaters. In this case, while there might be some room for disagreement, Vance had far the better side of the facts. The Haitian migrants in Springfield have almost entirely entered the country illegally, but the Biden administration has purported to grant them something called “Temporary Protected Status.” So there was nothing false about what Vance had said, and the basis on which the Haitians have at least temporary legal status is a result of dubious Biden administration executive action. When Vance tried to explain that situation, the moderators cut off his microphone.

Finally there is the idea that any difficult problem faced by the people is a “crisis” that calls for immediate intervention by the federal government to solve it. As the debate went on, that became a recurring theme. First up, it was the “housing crisis.” From Brennan:

There's a shortage of more than 4 million homes in the United States and this contributes to the high housing crisis.

And then some time later, also from Brennan, it was the “childcare crisis”:

There is a childcare crisis in this country, and the United States is one of the very few developed countries in the world without a national paid leave program for new parents.

I think that the term “childcare crisis” is nothing more than a description of the fact — that has been true since the dawn of human history — that raising children is a difficult and challenging task. Fortunately in the world of CBS and other corporate media, such “crisis” and any others like it can always be promptly solved by the spending of sufficient funds from the infinite pile of loot at the disposal of the federal government.

Clearly, Trump has made a wise decision to decline to do future debates except on Fox.