Democracy
Former Republican representatives urge live fact-checking for ABC debate
Last week, 21 former Republican members of Congress sent a letter to ABC News president Almin Karamehmedovic urging him to implement live fact-checking during the presidential debate on Tuesday.
The group, Former Republican Members of Congress for Harris, is led by former Pennsylvania Rep. Jim Greenwood and former Rhode Island Rep. Claudine Schneider. On Tuesday, Schneider spoke to Heartland Signal explaining the group’s position.
“It’s very important that unlike the last debate of Donald Trump and President Biden, where Trump was spewing lies and confusing the voters, that it would be important that we have real time fact-checking as part of the ABC debate between Trump and Vice President [Kamala] Harris,” said Schneider, who served in Congress between 1981 and 1991.
Schneider also indicated that ABC had not responded to the letter, but she hoped to see them implement the fact checking via a real-time crawl on the bottom of the screen. After his debate against President Joe Biden on June 27, several news outlets fact-checked Trump’s claims in the days following the event, with PolitiFact finding and publishing dozens of lies and embellishments.
However, Schneider and her colleagues argue that most people who will watch the debate, which will likely include many viewers who do not closely follow politics, will not read these fact-checks later.
“This election should not be close! Low-information voters, as well as the siloed misinformed voters, are the reason,” the letter reads. “They are real and they are dangerous. However, they, and perhaps more than 60 million viewers will tune into ABC for the September 10th debate. It may be the ONLY opportunity for truth to be told!”
According to Variety, Trump’s CNN-hosted debate with Biden was viewed by more 51 million people across 17 networks. With the presidential election less than two months away and Trump now facing Harris, it is likely that ABC’s debate will draw even more attention than CNN’s.
Schneider admitted that it would be difficult to fact-check everything Trump says given the volume of misinformation that is pedaled during a given event, but that networks like ABC should still try because of the stakes of the election.
“There have been dozens of psychiatrists in the previous election indicating that he [Trump] is not fit to be president,” Schneider said. “And I think we are now seeing, every time the man speaks, he cannot complete a thought. And most of those thoughts have to do with retribution and more lies. This puts our nation in a dangerous place.”
Last month, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell slammed networks for airing a press conference held by Trump without fact-checking his lies, saying every network “has the capacity” to “run a live scroll at the side of the screen fact-checking. Not all of them, that would be impossible, but many of them as he speaks.”
The late political writer Walter Shapiro also hinted at the possibility of live fact-checking presidential debates in 2020.
In addition to Schneider and Greenwood, former representatives like Barbara Comstock, Adam Kinzinger and David Trott have signed the letter. Many of these former lawmakers are lifelong Republicans who are no longer in office due partially to blowback from their party because of their opposition to Trump and his policies. Some are also members of Republicans for Integrity, an organization co-founded by Schneider that rejects the far-right trends of the modern Republican Party.
Neither the Trump nor Harris campaigns responded to a media inquiry asking if they support live fact-checking during debates.
The Harris-Trump debate will be held in Philadelphia at 9 p.m. EST on Tuesday night, and it will be streamed on ABC News Live, Disney+ and Hulu, along with simulcasts on numerous broadcast and news networks.