Nexstar Rejects Fetterman Campaign’s Claim About Closed Captioning Errors During Debate With Dr. Oz

Following the candidate debate between Republican Mehmet Oz and Democrat John Fetterman on Tuesday, a spokesman for the Fetterman campaign said the candidate did very well considering he was dealing with “delayed captions filled with errors.”

As with an NBC News interview recently, Fetterman relied on closed captions in order to better process the questions and answers at the NewsNation-hosted debate, due to issues resulting from a stroke this year. The campaign has said that this is merely an “audio processing” issue and does not represent any impairment to the candidate’s mental faculties.

Fetterman’s health was brought up by the candidate and within the context of debate questions on Tuesday night, and was the subject of media attention both Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, including on MSNBC.

It was just after the debate when the campaign communications director Joe Calvello said to reporters that the candidate, “did remarkably well tonight – especially when you consider that he’s still recovering from a stroke and was working off of delayed captions filled with errors. John won countless exchanges, counter-punched aggressively, and pushed back on Oz’s cruelty and attacks.”

That comment went far and wide online, and Nexstar, parent company of NewsNation, which hosted the debate, put out a statement from Chief Communications Officer Gary Weitman defending their system as having worked “as expected.”

Both candidates agreed to the technical set-up for the closed captioning process weeks ago, which was implemented at the request of the Fetterman campaign. Both candidates were offered the opportunity for two full rehearsals with the same equipment used in tonight’s debate. Mr. Fetterman chose to do only one.

In fact, Nexstar’s production team went to extraordinary lengths to ensure the effectiveness of the closed captioning process, and to accommodate several last-minute requests of the Fetterman campaign. The closed captioning process functioned as expected during rehearsal and again during tonight’s debate. We regret that Mr. Fetterman and his campaign feel otherwise.

The comment from the Fetterman campaign was not exactly an indictment of the debate, although his campaign does have a history of attacking over this issue. And Nexstar’s statement in defense was not exactly a refutation of the claim that there were delays or errors, although it did present as a contradiction of any implication that the system was a factor in Fetterman’s performance.

The Fetterman campaign has not responded to the comment from Nexstar at the time of this post.

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