Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell will be the first female duo to moderate a vice presidential debate.
Vice presidential nominees Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will take the stage in New York City on Oct. 1 for the only vice presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle, moderated by CBS News’s Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell.
Brennan, the anchor of “Face the Nation,” and O’Donnell, the anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” will be the first female duo to moderate a vice presidential debate.
O’Donnell has been with CBS News since 2011. She was with NBC News between 1999 and 2011 where she served in multiple correspondent and anchor roles.
Upon joining CBS, she was chief White House correspondent and a fill-in anchor for the “CBS Evening News” and “Face the Nation. She has also been a correspondent for ”60 Minutes.”
O’Donnell has interviewed many high-profile figures including a rare one-on-one with Pope Francis. She has also interviewed former President Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and the Dalai Lama. She was the first to interview President Joe Biden after he took office.
Brennan has been with the 97-year-old network since July 2012. She previously was at Bloomberg Television, where she was an anchor, and CNBC, where she was a producer and correspondent.
Before becoming the anchor of the CBS flagship Sunday news program, she covered the White House.
Like O’Donnell, Brennan has interviewed prominent individuals including Biden, Haley, Vance, former Secretaries of State John Kerry and Mike Pompeo, former President Donald Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore.
O’Donnell and Brennan will be in the spotlight just weeks after the presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the respective GOP and Democrat nominees for the White House. The debate was criticized by some conservatives for alleged bias against Trump. Much of the criticism was leveled at the moderators, ABC News’s David Muir and Linsey Davis.
“They weren’t necessarily in control of what was going on, and they only fact-checked one of the two candidates,” Andrew Selepak, a professor of journalism at the University of Florida, told The Epoch Times earlier this month. “The moderator should be humble, and not seeking to be the star of the show. A good moderator should sound neutral.”
Steven Fein, a professor at Williams College whose specialties include media and presidential debates, told The Epoch Times that asking “good questions that most Americans want answered,” pushing the candidates to actually answer them but then moving on, and ensuring the candidates “follow the rules and stay within the time limits” are key elements of good moderation.
“A good moderator asks serious questions on serious topics and doesn’t ‘fact check in real-time,’” Tim Graham, executive editor of the NewsBusters blog at the conservative Media Research Center, told the Epoch Times. “That delays the debate from exploring more topics. We all know the rest of the media are ‘fact checking in real time,’ so why should the moderator?”
The Epoch Times requested comment from ABC but did not receive a reply. CBS News did not respond to interview requests for O’Donnell and Brennan.