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In 2019, in the run-up to what would turn out to be the first impeachment of Donald Trump, Matt Gaetz, the far-right congressman, dismissed the inquiry as a “kangaroo court” and Adam Schiff, one of the Democrats who led it, as a “malicious Captain Kangaroo.” As a cultural reference, this made absolutely no sense, as I noted in this newsletter at the time, but over the years, the idea of the “kangaroo court” has recurred as a motif of Trumpian grievance; Trump himself has invoked it to delegitimize the criminal cases against him and the congressional investigation of the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. Last month, at least a handful of viewers used the phrase to criticize ABC News, as its moderators fact-checked some of Trump’s claims during the presidential debate on the network. Many, many other Republicans echoed the sentiment, if not the exact wording.
Which brings me to the second time that I’ve had the occasion to mention Captain Kangaroo in this newsletter: last night’s vice presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz on CBS, which was hosted, as several stories noted ahead of time, in the same New York City studio where the kids show was filmed between 1964 and 1981. (Remarkably, this is more recent than the last time New York hosted a general election debate, in 1960.) One of those preview stories, by David Bauder of the Associated Press, contained other curious nuggets about how CBS planned to handle the debate, and its apparent differences of approach compared with ABC. The candidates’ microphones, we were told, would not be automatically muted when they weren’t speaking (though CBS reserved the right to do so). More notably, the network suggested that the moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, would “facilitate” the candidates’ fact-checking each other, but not interject and do it themselves.
In this, Bauder wrote, CBS was “clearly indicating it wants to take a step back from the heat generated by calling attention to misleading statements by candidates.” Liberal critics were harsher: the watchdog group Media Matters for America suggested that the network had “thrown in the towel” in advance; Brian Beutler described the apparent retreat from real-time fact-checking as “an indication of how powerful institutions will bend to Trump should he win the presidency,” adding “capitulation is complicity.” But it was possible to view CBS’s statements less as a departure from an existing standard than a reversion to the norm: in both this and previous cycles, networks have tended to insist that debates aren’t the best forum for correcting candidates’ statements. And CBS did say that it would offer some live fact-checking via its website. In itself, this was not unusual—but CBS took a novel step by pledging to link to those efforts via a QR code displayed on air during the debate. “The idea is to give people that second-screen experience,” an executive said.
And, in the end, the moderators did do some fact-checking, or something awfully like it—in one or two instances anyway. At the end of a discussion on the climate crisis—during which Vance accepted “the idea that carbon emissions drives all the climate change” for “the sake of argument, so we’re not arguing about weird science”—O’Donnell noted that the “overwhelming consensus among scientists is that the earth’s climate is warming at an unprecedented rate.” Then, after Vance alluded to “illegal immigrants” overwhelming the city of Springfield, Ohio (where he has previously claimed, falsely, that Haitians are eating people’s pets), Brennan chimed in to clarify that many of the Haitians in Springfield have legal status. This upset Vance: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check,” he said, then kept talking. After a while, CBS exercised its right to turn off his mic so that the debate could move on.
This teed off the same sort of right-wing outrage as had greeted the fact-checking on ABC last month: Megyn Kelly posted “F you CBS – how DARE YOU”; Donald Trump Jr. assailed O’Donnell and Brennan as “Fake News hacks”; Trump, who was live-Truthing his reaction to the debate, complained, too (though he’d already concluded that “Both young ladies have been extremely biased Anchors!”). If such criticisms were pathetically overblown after the debate on ABC—which, in reality, pushed back on only a handful of egregiously false claims—they felt even more so this time, as various observers were quick to point out. In a column for the Washington Post, Dana Milbank called out Vance for “whining.” “In a ‘Captain Kangaroo’ debate,” the headline read, “JD Vance hops over the truth.”
The debate over fact-checking debates has, by now, become tedious and overblown; as I wrote after the ABC debate, all I, for one, have ever wanted to see is an acknowledgment from major networks that they won’t let the most profound lies slide in high-level political discourse. Like ABC before it, CBS deserves credit for its interventions last night, even if it only cleared a very low bar (and then only just). Other aspects of the network’s performance were praiseworthy, too. Many of the questions were substantive, and the moderators posed some sharp follow-ups. The climate crisis was the second topic of the night, a welcome sight in an election-year news cycle that has too often relegated the story; the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Helene made the issue of extreme weather close to unavoidable, but O’Donnell nonetheless used it deftly to ask about the science behind intensifying hurricanes, a step that major outlets have too often failed to take in their coverage, then asked Vance directly whether he agrees with Trump that climate change is a “hoax.” (Before the debate, six young activists with the Sunrise Movement were reportedly arrested after staging a sit-in outside CBS News to demand a climate question in the debate. Afterward, the movement praised O’Donnell for her “masterclass” in asking one.)
There were some problems, though. Ukraine was not mentioned once during the debate—a glaring omission given the chasm between Walz and Vance on the question of supporting the country, and Trump’s checkered history with it. (Ukraine, it’s all too easy to forget, was at the center of the impeachment inquiry that Gaetz dismissed in kangarooish terms.) And, as the debate progressed, various critics complained that there hadn’t yet been a question on democracy. “The conceit of this CBS debate is that this is just a normal policy election, two guys shooting the shit about housing starts and health care financing,” The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser wrote seventy-five or so minutes in. “Misses the moment pretty dramatically.”
Finally, a question on democracy did come, and it was a good one: O’Donnell challenged Vance on his claim that he would have refused to certify the 2020 election result, noting that his position “has been called unconstitutional and illegal”; there followed a revealing exchange that culminated in Walz asking Vance whether Trump lost in 2020 and Vance refusing to say. (“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said.) As several journalists suggested, though, it all came too late. Other news organizations, of course, still had the opportunity to center Vance’s evasions in their post-debate coverage, and some—including, notably, The Guardian and The Atlantic—did so. But various major outlets led instead with the surprising “civility” of the proceedings as a whole. (The Post opened its top story by describing the debate as “a political joust with a healthy side of Midwest nice.”)
This sort of coverage channeled an obsession with optics that is infuriating at the best of times, but indefensible when one of the candidates onstage has just refused to acknowledge an election result—perhaps the highest form of political incivility, among many other ways of describing it. More broadly, this narrative seemed to play into an obvious trap that Vance set: the fact that, unlike Trump, he is able to cloak the undeniable extremism of some of his positions in what I have previously described as “polished, debate-meet affectations” that mainstream media interlocutors take seriously. Last night, arguably, was exhibit A for that proposition.
If the debate studio once hosted Captain Kangaroo, the CBS Broadcast Center as a whole used to be a milk-processing plant; after the debate was over and action switched to the “spin room,” one CBS reporter on the scene noted this history on air, adding, “It does feel like cattle is being herded here.” Like Trump after the ABC debate, Vance himself headed into the spin room last night; in Trump’s case, this was taken as a sign that he had just lost and knew it, but Vance’s presence was telegraphed in advance, raising the possibility that he might try to schmooze the mainstream media some more. In the end, many journalists were reportedly blocked from the room as the Secret Service locked it down due to Vance’s presence. Vance, for his part, did a hit on Fox News, then left.
Other notable stories:
- Following last night’s debate, Kamala Harris’s campaign once again challenged Trump to a final presidential debate, in Atlanta on October 23—though Trump once again signaled that he isn’t interested. Relatedly, CBS said that Trump had backed out of a scheduled interview on 60 Minutes next week, part of a broader quadrennial election special that will still go ahead featuring interviews with Harris and Walz. (Trump’s campaign denied that an interview was ever agreed to.) And All the Smoke, a podcast hosted by the former NBA stars Stephen Jackson and Matt Barnes, put out its interview with Harris, which we noted had been recorded last week. Tommy Vietor, of the liberal outlet Crooked Media, said that Harris should talk with reporters, too, but that the sit-down was “super interesting and covers a lot of different ground.”
- Recently, New York magazine placed Olivia Nuzzi, a star political reporter, on leave after bosses learned (and Nuzzi acknowledged) that she had engaged in a “personal relationship” with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom she had previously profiled for the magazine. Now CNN reports that Nuzzi is “publicly accusing” her ex-fiancé, Ryan Lizza, a prominent journalist at Politico, of “orchestrating a harassment and blackmail campaign” against her; in a court filing, Nuzzi alleged that Lizza “had stolen a personal electronic device from her, was hacking her devices, then anonymously shopping information about her to the media.” Lizza denies the allegations; yesterday, Politico said that he will take a leave of absence while they are investigated.
- In media-business news, CNN began rolling out a paywall for its website; Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton reckons that it has a better chance of success than CNN+, the network’s short-lived streaming service, but still must convince readers that it is “distinctive enough” to pay for. Elsewhere, DirecTV is acquiring Dish Network, a rival, in a deal that will create “the country’s largest pay-TV company and is seen as essential for both companies’ survival amid cord-cutting,” per Axios. And Taylor Lorenz, a tech writer at the Washington Post, is launching her own publication on Substack, called User Mag, telling the Hollywood Reporter that she “just wanted to get out of legacy media.”
- Yesterday, Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, spoke publicly for the first time since he pleaded guilty, earlier this year, to illegally obtaining and disclosing US national security information in a deal that freed him from a London prison and ended a long extradition fight. “I want to be totally clear: I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism,” Assange told a rights group based in France. “The fundamental issue is simple: Journalists should not be prosecuted for doing their jobs.”
- And The Guardian reported yesterday that police in London were investigating a “suspected gunshot” fired at a taxi carrying Ian Hislop, a British journalist best known for his satire but whose magazine, Private Eye, has also conducted hard-hitting investigations. A source told The Guardian that police had not established a motive, however—and this morning, officials said that they had found no evidence of a shot so far, instead suggesting that a mechanical fault caused the window to shatter.
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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.