If you’ve somehow managed to dodge the hip-deep hoopla, the first presidential debate is tonight. Lester Holt of NBC's Nightly News will be serving as moderator.
Asked about fact checking, the executive director of the Commission on Presidential Debates , Janet Brown, provides an answer that sounds remarkably like one of the candidates.
I think, personally, if you are starting to get into the fact-check, I’m not sure what is the big fact and what is the little fact? And if you and I have different sources of information, does your source about the unemployment rate agree with my source?
Well of course not, especially when my source on the unemployment rate is in my pants. Good to know that’s an accepted authority. Being able to name a source does not a fact make. Trump literally has the chief of his own news service on staff, making up new “facts” for him as needed. And if the source of a fact is “many people say” does that match up to the Congressional Budget Office? It shouldn’t.
I don’t think it is a good idea to get the moderator into essentially serving as the Encyclopedia Britannica.
No one is asking the moderator to have the exact length of the Zambezi at his fingertips, but we might at least expect the moderator to serve as Encyclopedia Brown and follow up on a few obvious whoppers.
Daily Kos will be liveblogging the debates beginning at 9PM ET. You can watch along by tuning in the debate on ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Univision, C-SPAN, and likely the fillings in your teeth—but try C-SPAN if you don’t want your debate pre-loaded with people holding down buttons and glossy holographic sets. If you need to stream from an online site, you can try the web pages of all of the above, plus Huffington Post, Politico, Yahoo and Hulu.
Honestly, it’s going to be hard to miss the broadcast. This is expected to be the most-watched presidential debate since the rather prolonged Washington vs. George III (and that one was rather rough on the critical 18-35 demographic). So watch where you will, but join us tonight for responses and analysis from the DK staff and the smartest community on the net.
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