Herb Strentz was dean of the Drake School of Journalism from 1975 to 1988 and professor there until retirement in 2004. He was executive secretary of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council from its founding in 1976 to 2000.

Sorry to rain on the parade, but here’s a metaphor about the news media excitement and anticipation generated by the forecast of a September 10 presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump: Looking forward to that debate (and its possible sequel) is like going to the busiest intersection in town or camping out along a freeway looking forward to a traffic accident—maybe, if you’re lucky, even one in which someone is seriously injured.

Inherent in the presidential debates is a sense of suspense, and it’s not whether worthwhile information will be offered to viewer. The suspense has been whether one of the two, or both, may suffer a self-inflicted injury by blundering into a campaign-damaging statement or behavior. 

Trump, however, seems to escape being accountable despite his frequent lies. It is a real-life application of what he said in Sioux Center in January 2016: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?…It’s, like, incredible.”

More on such lies later. First let’s look at why the debates are not really debates, but more like a sideshow in which viewers are treated to 90 or so minutes of Q&A, of pointing with pride and viewing with alarm.

A debate should offer informative, well-reasoned exchange of opinions. Today’s televised debates, however, focus on well traveled issues and offer little insight on how a would-be president would handle the unexpected, the earth-shaking crises that may arise during the next four years. Instead we await “gotcha” moments or blunders from one candidate or the other.

For example, here’s a summary of Richard Nixon’s self-inflicted “injuries” in the first televised debate with John F. Kennedy in 1960:

Nixon showed up wearing little makeup and a light grey suit, which blended into the background. He was constantly wiping sweat off his face and according to the audience looked exhausted and pale. Not only was Nixon’s physical appearance an issue, but Nixon kept looking at a clock, which television viewers could not see making him appear shifty-eyed. Unknown to the general public at the time, Nixon’s extensive campaigning left him physically exhausted, disheveled and made him lose about 15 pounds.

The next presidential debate format was not until 1976, with President Gerald Ford, who came into office after Nixon’s 1974 Watergate-related resignation, and Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter.

In 2016, Rick Hampson of USA TODAY wrote of Ford’s blunder back then:

Ford was asked about the 1975 Helsinki Accords, an attempt to improve relations between the Communist Eastern Bloc and the Western democracies that was unpopular with many Americans of Eastern European descent.

What Ford meant to say: We don’t officially accept or diplomatically recognize Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.

What Ford actually said: “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under the Ford administration.’’

The questioner, Max Frankel of The New York Times, appeared unable to believe his ears. He gave Ford a chance to reverse himself: “Did I understand you to say, sir, that the Russians are not using Eastern Europe as their own sphere of influence?”

Ford dug in deeper. “I don’t believe that the Romanians consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union. I don’t believe that the Poles consider themselves dominated by the Soviet Union.”

Reagan’s “There you go again”

In his debates and in press conferences, Ronald Reagan would respond to criticism or problems with a smile and the disarming line, “There you go again”—suggesting the question or issue at hand was tiresome or had already been adequately dealt with. Reagan used “There you go again” to great effect in his 1980 debate with then President Carter. He brought it out again as president in his 1984 debate with Carter’s vice president, Democratic nominee Walter Mondale.

Others have borrowed Reagan’s line as well. GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin trotted out “There you go again” in her 2008 debate with Democratic opponent Joe Biden.

Barack Obama had a “here we go again” reaction to the Biden-Trump debate and Biden showing the weariness that Nixon exhibited in 1960. Obama’s comment, however, recalled not Nixon but his own poor performance in his 2012 debate against Republican Mitt Romney. “Bad debate nights happen. Trust me. I know,” he said in a social media post.

The worth of another “debate” in 2024 is questionable. I put “debate” in quotes, since the event may be more of a political sideshow. Given Trump’s record of lying, the worth of this format in 2024 is doubtful. (I opt for philosopher Sissela Bok’s definition of a lie: a “statement intended to deceive,” which distinguishes lies from statements that are simply wrong or based on misinformation. Let’s not get into “alternative facts” here.)

In comments on the Biden-Trump debate, the focus is on how Biden’s performance led to Kamala Harris replacing him on the Democratic ticket. Other points are significant, however, with regard to the Harris-Trump matchup.

PolitiFact—a non-profit operated by the well-respected Poynter [journalism] Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida—reported that CNN had decided “that the moderators would not challenge the candidates over their accuracy. So, whenever one candidate made inaccurate statements, it was up to his opponent to push back—and much of the time, neither did so effectively.” Viewers “were left with little guidance about what was true.”

Furthermore,

PolitiFact fact-checked nearly 30 claims on debate night, and although Biden had a couple of False and Mostly False statements, plus a number of Half True statements in which he omitted context, Trump went largely unchallenged within the debate on three Mostly False claims, a dozen straight False claims and one that got our worst rating, Pants on Fire. 

A relentless barrage of deception

FactCheck, a project at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, said the debate “featured a relentless barrage of false and misleading statements from the two candidates on immigration, the economy, abortion, taxes and more.”

By my count, the Annenberg project noted 24 topics in the barrage of false and misleading statements. Trump contributed seventeen, Biden six, and both erred with regard to Social Security issues. (To me, Trump’s errors were the more flagrant.)

On August 8, six weeks after the debate, Trump held an hour-long press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. National Public Radio reported: “A team of NPR reporters and editors reviewed the transcript of his news conference and found at least 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies in 64 minutes. That’s more than two a minute. It’s a stunning number for anyone – and even more problematic for a person running to lead the free world.”

These recent counts of Trump lies lend credibility to the January 2021 report by The Washington Post that in his four years as president, Trump had accumulated more than 30,000 lies, false or misleading claims or other untruths. The number is astounding. Perhaps The Post erred, the number at worst was around 20,000. Even at that it amounts to more than a dozen a day (13.7 to be precise, including one Leap Day!)

Three concluding thoughts:

• If ABC decides to follow CNN and not allow the moderator to fact check a comment by Harris or Trump, it might at least tell viewers where they can find reports by Poynter, Annenberg, or others.
• The Democratic and Republican Party platforms purport to address the high cost of living. But the high cost of lying is more perilous to our democracy.
• Post-debate analyses typically focus on which candidate won or lost. What we need is an analysis that says: Both candidates did well; the voters are the winners.