Lester Holt tries, with mixed success, to fact-check the debates

After a week of debate over whether the moderator of the first presidential debate should fact-check answers in addition to asking questions, Lester Holt’s answer was to try, but not always succeed.

More than half a dozen times during the debate, Holt interrupted to question a candidate — on all but one occasion, Donald Trump — who he said had gone off track. It was not as much intervention as many on Twitter apparently would have liked, but far more than Matt Lauer had done during his controversial back-to-back interviews with the candidates a few weeks ago, a lapse that led to the argument over fact-checking by moderators in the first place.

Holt’s most combative interaction with Trump was over whether the Republican nominee had supported the war in Iraq — which, not coincidentally, was what Lauer was strongly criticized for not challenging.

“You supported the war in Iraq,” Holt’s question began, and Trump insisted he did not, even as Twitter filled with audio of him saying exactly that.

They had a similar exchange during a discussion of stop-and-frisk.

“Stop-and-frisk was ruled unconstitutional in New York because it largely singled out black and Hispanic young men,” Holt said after Trump praised the program and suggested it be used nationwide.

“No, uh, you’re wrong,” Trump said, contrary to fact.

The constitutional argument against the programs is “that these programs are racial profiling,” Holt responded.

“No,” Trump replied, debating the moderator. “The argument is that they should take the guns away from these people, they are bad people.”

Finally, near the end of the debate, Holt asked him about comments he had made that Hillary Clinton did not have a presidential “look.”

Trump responded that what he had questioned was Clinton’s stamina. Holt corrected him. “You said ‘I just don’t think she has the presidential look,’” he responded.

“I said stamina,” Trump insisted, although that is not what he had said.

Many of Trump’s answers were notably long and rambling, leading commenters on social media to criticize Holt for not cutting him off and “CNN Launches Manhunt After Lester Holt Vanishes From Debate,” the New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz wrote on the magazine’s website.

Others praised Holt for his restraint. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof tweeted: “Lester Holt has done a fine job as moderator. Not too intrusive, moving this along, fact-checking when necessary.”

However it was possibly the rules of the debate, and not the philosophy that moderators not step in, that led Holt to remain quiet. The debate was divided into six 15-minute segments, with each candidate having two minutes to respond followed by 10 minutes of open discussion between the candidates.

The question of how involved a moderator should be in a presidential debate did not start with this one. Before the first debate between George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000, Jim Lehrer said the job should be one of “facilitator” and that it was “up to each of the candidates to correct the other’s facts. If I fact-checked everything, that’s all I’d do all night.”

More recently, moderator Candy Crowley did fact-check Mitt Romney in an October 2012 debate with Barack Obama, taking the president’s side when the candidates disagreed over whether Obama had described the Benghazi attacks as “terrorism” earlier or later on the timeline.

Crowley’s insertion brought complaints from Romney supporters, but because this campaign is so different from any that has come before, the issue took on more magnified importance before the Hofstra confrontation. Clinton supporters were full-throated in their insistence that Holt be more like Crowley. Trump supporters said that would reflect bias on the part of the moderator, a back-and-forth that itself wound up being fact-checked.

“Lester is a Democrat,” Trump said. “It’s a phony system.”

Reporters immediately checked New York State voting records and found that Holt, in fact, is a registered Republican.

Confronted with the misstatement, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said on MSNBC that because “”I don’t know that he knew what Lester Holt’s voter registration was,” the statement was technically not a “lie.”