While all eyes will be on President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden during Tuesday night’s presidential debate, the third person up there, Fox News’s Chris Wallace, could play the decisive role.
Wallace, 72, the son of 60 Minutes anchor Mike Wallace, is not expected to act as a fact-checker for the two candidates, rather he plans on facilitating the conversation between the two, allowing them to fact-check one another.
“My job is to be as invisible as possible,” Wallace said on the network on Monday. “I try to get them to engage, to focus on the key issues, to give people at home a sense of why I want to vote for one versus the other. But if I’ve done my job right, at the end of the night, people will say, ‘That was a great debate. Who was the moderator?’”
Frank Fahrenkopf Jr., co-chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates, has shared his support for Wallace’s anticipated approach.
“So, the moderator is a facilitator … We don’t expect Chris or our other moderators to be fact-checkers. The minute the TV is off, there are going to be plenty of fact-checkers in every newspaper and television station in the world. That is not the main role of our moderators,” he said in an interview on CNN.
Fahrenkopf also noted, “If one of these candidates says something on the stage Tuesday, it’s the role of the other person in a debate to be the one to raise that and say, ‘Wait a minute, you’re changing the position’ and so forth, rather than the moderator.”
Wallace’s approach for Tuesday night’s 90-minute uninterrupted debate at Case Western Reserve University is similar to how he viewed his role for moderating the third and final debate between then-candidate Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He received widespread praise for the way he performed.
“I do not believe it is my job to be a truth squad,” Wallace, who was the first Fox News anchor to host a general election presidential debate, said in the run-up to the 2016 debate. “It’s up to the other person to catch them on that.”
Wallace, who has spent time as a reporter for the Boston Globe, followed by stints at NBC and ABC, has already faced criticism from both sides of the political spectrum.
Trump has made his disdain of Wallace known throughout his presidency.
“It’ll be unfair, I have no doubt about it,” Trump said earlier in September. “He’ll be controlled by the radical Left. That’s what — they control him.”
The president, who sat down for a contentious interview with the Fox News anchor over the summer, has also said that Wallace “will never be his father.”
Conversely, some on the Left rebuked the anchor for one of the prereleased topics for the debate — “Race and Violence in Our Cities.” The subject, according to critics, was an inappropriate way to frame the societal unrest amid protests against racism and systemic injustices.
The Biden campaign said the debate will have a “Fox News framing” and is preparing the former vice president for it to play out that way, according to the Washington Post.
