CBS Presented Reactionary Idiocy as Serious Journalism at the VP Debate

Yesterday, I wrote about CBS’s plan to fact-check the Vice-Presidential debate with a QR code, and tried to give them the benefit of the doubt that they would use this opportunity to do good journalism.

I regret the error.

Some of CBS’s questions last night were so bad that in her recap of the debate for Splinter, Jen Kirby rightly defended JD Vance and Tim Walz’s filibustering as “justifiable or even necessary because some of the CBS moderators’ questions were a bit confounding.”

Let’s go through some of these questions that CBS asked which would be right at home in a Heritage Foundation booklet. Even JD Vance pretended to be taken aback by some of their framing that he has probably repeated himself on some obscure right-wing podcast in the past.

“Governor Walz, if you are the final voice in the situation room, would you support or oppose a preemptive strike by Israel on Iran? “

To echo Jen Kirby, “I’m sorry, what?”

CBS opened the debate by making JD Vance look like a sane and well-adjusted human by dodging this utterly insane question inherently egging on a war that is spiraling out of control. CBS’s next question was to Vance over the U.S. backing out of the Iran deal and whether Trump made a mistake by it. This juxtaposition of force and diplomacy could be framed as earnest journalistic inquiry to explore both primary options on the table right now, but the rest of CBS’s questions throughout the night destroyed what little benefit of the doubt I had remaining that I didn’t waste on them yesterday.

“Governor, what about our CBS News polling, which does show that a majority of Americans, more than 50%, support mass deportations?”

What the hell! This isn’t a question! Are you saying mass deportation is good? Because that’s the only implication I can kind of sort of glean from this non-question. Let’s move on before I hurt my head thinking any more about this idiotic framing.

“The Wharton School says your proposals will increase the nation’s deficit by $1.2 trillion. How would you pay for that without ballooning the deficit?”

Fuck you. I want to go back to the non-question question. That was less tedious than this classic birdbrained nonsense.

I cannot believe we are still doing this bullshit in 2024, especially when CBS opened asking the candidates whether they would write a blank check for Israel with no question of how to pay for it. Using the amorphous, non-descriptive and just flat-out wrong portrayal of the “deficit” as a monolith here is so deceitful. Deficits change year-over-year, and if CBS wanted to at least feign intellectual inquiry in this Heritage Foundation-ass question, they would have used the increase in the debt as their big scary number.

Look at any companies’ balance sheet, you’ll see deficits early on in their life, with growth coming later. Are those early losses where companies invest in future growth bad? CBS’s doltish economic doofuses seem to think so. The American government’s budgets are planned out over ten-year periods. Why are we zooming in on one year’s budgetary impact of a ten-plus year plan and pretending to be Very Serious Economists???

“Governor Walz, can you address that? I mean, voters say they trust Donald Trump on the economy more. Why?”

Because idiots at CBS explain it poorly to them and let liars like Trump get away with murder. Hope that helps! Why in the world do they keep asking Tim Walz to explain the intricacies and inconsistencies of the policy views of the American electorate? What is going on here?

“Senator, do you want to respond to the governor’s claim? Will you create a federal pregnancy monitoring agency?”

JD Vance said “No, Norah, certainly we won’t,” and CBS’ less than useless live QR code-driven fact-check apparently took his word for it over what Project 2025’s policy outline actually says. CBS wrote “Project 2025 does not call for a registry of pregnancies,” which is patently untrue, as Jessica Valenti pointed out on Twitter.

The most charitable reading I can make is that CBS seems to believe “all” pregnancies are implied in their fact-check, but we can only take them at what they wrote, which is factually incorrect. Project 2025 says “HHS should use every available tool to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders…it should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatment that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion.”

Those are all pregnancies that Project 2025 calls to be registered with the HHS. Yet again, public-facing fact-checkers beclown themselves in service of a right-wing agenda.

“Former President Trump said in the last debate that. You believe abortion, quote, in the 9th month is absolutely fine. Yes or no? Is that what you support?”

I’ve been saying my whole career that much of the mainstream media generally prefers stenography to journalism, and CBS went ahead and wrote a debate question to prove me right. As Tim Walz noted, this is not what the bill at the core of Trump’s lie says, so why is CBS asking him to respond to this provably untrue claim?

We know the answer, because mainstream journalism has largely abdicated its responsibility to the truth. They’re not the ones to tell their viewers what is and is not a fact, just what someone else alleges is one, and that’s why CBS structured this debate around passing the buck to Walz and Vance to call out each other’s falsehoods. Journalism is bad for media’s bottom line, and this kind of questioning is a conscious decision to take the coward’s way out that is filled with more money and less integrity.

“Senator Vance, as far as your campaign’s position, the promise is to seize federal lands to build homes, remove regulation, provide tax breaks, and cut back on immigration, which you say pushes up prices. Where are you going to build all the new homes you’re promising?”

This one isn’t reactionary, it’s just a weird question. That entire setup describing Trump’s agenda is good, and it provides endless avenues to discuss his proposals in detail, but “where are the houses being built” is not exactly the headline question over Trump’s housing “policy.”

But the real reason I used this question is to contrast what a journalist, Margaret Brennan said, versus what CBS’s graphics team produced. Brennan correctly pointed out that Trump alleges that immigration pushes up housing prices and, in a follow-up, demanded that Vance produce evidence of this absurd assertion, but according to the people in charge of producing CBS’s graphics, Trump’s racist plan is just basic economic fact.

When future generations are picking through the rubble of the American empire trying to figure out what happened, they will stumble on the phrase “mass deportation to ease demand” from an alleged news organization and get a pretty big clue.

Just in case you weren’t convinced that CBS would fail any economics 101 class in the country yet, they also produced one of the great modern chart crimes, comparing rates of change from two different kinds of economic growth and starting from entirely different starting points, with the net result being packaging garden variety GOP economic idiocy as intelligent thought.

This CBS pre-debate graphic is a disgrace pic.twitter.com/ps9p4xmsXS

— Marc Bodnick (@MarcBodnick) October 2, 2024

I actually think Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell on the whole did a good job last night, and the extensive discussion of policy in the debate was reflective of a lot of good questions challenging the candidates on specific positions. The moderators did as much as they reasonably could to fact-check the debate under their limited powers by elevating Vance’s lies and presenting them to Walz to challenge.

Brennan even overruled CBS’s agreement with the Trump campaign to not fact check their lying liar who lies and interjected when Vance raised his racist libel against the Haitian immigrant population of Springfield, Ohio, creating the debate’s only real unique moment where Vance whined like a small child, saying, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact check.”

CBS agreed not to do fact checks, but their problem is that despite their best efforts, they do still employ journalists like Margaret Brennan whose instincts cannot be overruled by the cynicism of corporate media’s economic desires to keep everybody happy. The vast gulf between the tight ship Brennan and O’Donnell tried to run and the graphics and coverage CBS provided around the debate is instructive as to where the acute problems in mainstream media lie.

Who wrote these questions is a mystery, and the diversity of them ranging from specific and detailed policy inquiry to “ma’am this is a wendys” suggests that this was a collective effort from CBS News, and the commonality between CBS’s brain-damaged graphics and their reactionary questions helps paint a broader picture of the problems at CBS and where they lie.

In fairness to CBS, I don’t know what else I should have expected from an organization that let one of their “journalists,” Tony Dokoupil, tell Ta-Nehisi Coates to his face that he’s a terrorist in a proudly and aggressively disrespectful line of questioning on their signature morning show on Monday. CBS revealed their true reactionary face this week, and the organization whose former CEO said Trump “may not be good for America, but he’s damn good for CBS” sure looks like they want to follow through on that quote and Fox Newsify CBS to exchange as much of their journalism for profits as possible.