“I think people feel overwhelmed by the onslaught not just of how the news cycle is in hyperdrive, [but] the topics that happened during the week alone are massive,” said Brennan, the Face the Nation moderator, in a sit-down interview.

With a palpable uptick in news, and the constant threat of late-in-the-week developments disrupting an entire coverage plan, Brennan and her executive producer Mary Hager place a premium on being prepared to hold officials to account in real time. The Sunday shows’ fact-checking function has always been paramount, but the Trump administration’s record of falsehoods has put additional public pressure on journalists to call out lies in the moment.

“I think what’s changed is that there is more focus on our ability to fact-check,” said Hager, who’s run the show behind the scenes since 2011. “Not in the form of ‘Okay, Trump said 16 things that turned out not to be true,’ but just to make sure that our viewers know, you know, this is what the actual reality is.”

Trump’s tweets and the creation of ‘illusory truth’

Hager’s counterpart at This Week, Jonathan Greenberger, told me that viewers are looking for trusted journalists to help them sort through the noise. “The news you’re bombarded with over the course of the week on social media and everything else is even more partisan than it used to be,” said Greenberger, who has been the program’s executive producer since 2013. “It’s even more suspect. People aren’t sure what to believe, who to listen to. I feel like the mission that we have of, ‘Give us that hour and we’ll help sort things through’—I think that that is even more valuable today. There’s tons to make sense of.”

Though the Sunday shows see their mission as holding officials accountable, that’s difficult to do when administration officials aren’t often on the same page. “No one really speaks for the president other than the president,” said Brennan, who’s hosted Face the Nation since February and also serves as CBS’s senior foreign-affairs correspondent. “They can explain what they believe his policy should be and what they’re advising the president to do.” But “whether that voice that’s speaking to you is speaking reflective of where the president is … is something you’re also trying to kind of pick apart in the interview,” Brennan added. George Stephanopoulos, the longtime host of ABC’s This Week, concurs: “You can have guests come on delivering an administration line which isn’t necessarily the president’s line, which can be demonstrated even in the course of a broadcast by a tweet,” he told me.



Oftentimes, these instances when administration officials contradict one another are when the Sunday shows break the most news.

When United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley announced new sanctions on Russia on Face the Nation in April, the White House quickly made clear that she was on her own, exposing a rift in the administration’s message on one of its pressure points: Russia policy. The economic adviser Larry Kudlow said Haley might have experienced “momentary confusion,” to which Haley responded, with a forceful and telling statement: “With all due respect, I don’t get confused.”