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Facebook is also acting as the "exclusive social media sponsor" for the first and third presidential debates and will help members of the campus community leverage the power of Facebook Live to show what's happening at the debate site.

The role of moderators in presidential debates — how the Commission on Presidential Debates chooses them, which questions they should ask, how they should approach fact-checking — was a key theme in the first installment of the 2016 Notre Dame Forum, “Debating Our Future,” held Wednesday night at

Janet Brown, the executive director of the Commission on Presidential Debates, said that anyone will be able to submit a question. There are no guarantees, however, that those questions will make it on air. The moderators of the debate, ABC’s Martha Raddatz and CNN’s Anderson Cooper, will be under

The Commission on Presidential Debates is expected to soon announce which candidates will qualify for the first presidential debate, and at this point, it’s virtually impossible for any of the third party candidates to make the cut.

Never before has the commission given moderators a formal option to gather questions from the public via the internet for a general presidential election debate, according to Brown.

AARP is collaborating with all the debate host sites on a number of policy and community engagement activities to support our campaign's effort to urge the presidential candidates to give voters real answers on how they'll keep Social Security for future generations.

“People sitting out there want the moderator to yell ‘liar!’ It ain’t gonna happen,” said Lehrer, who moderated 12 presidential debates from 1988 to 2012.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said he doesn't want Anderson Cooper to moderate a presidential debate because he would be unfair.

“I don’t think Anderson Cooper should be a moderator, because Anderson Cooper works for CNN and over the last couple of days, I’ve seen how Anderson Cooper behaves,” Trump said. “He’ll be very biased, very biased. I don’t think he should be a moderator.”

Clinton's job, by contrast, is much harder. She's expected to do well on the basis of intelligence and experience -- but she doesn't have her husband's famous charisma. And while identifying Trump's flaws should be easy, establishing her own grand narrative will be much harder.

While Fallon acknowledged to MSNBC's Thomas Roberts that the campaign does not know which "Donald Trump we're gonna get," he dismissed the idea that Clinton's strategy would include eliciting an outburst from the famously unscripted candidate.

Lehrer and Bob Schieffer, another experienced moderator, spoke during a panel discussion at the University of Notre Dame Wednesday night about how to strike the right balance between fact checking a candidate and staying out the way.