Meet the Walz-Vance debate moderators: Margaret Brennan and Norah O’Donnell

CBS News is presenting the only debate between the 2024 presidential running mates on Tuesday. Gov. Tim Walz, the Democrat from Minnesota, will face off against Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) starting at 6 p.m. (Pacific).
The candidates will be questioned by “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, who queries Washington power players each week on the Sunday public affairs program “Face the Nation.” The event at the CBS Broadcast Center on Manhattan’s West Side will mark the first time two women have moderated any general election presidential or vice presidential debate.
CBS is making the debate available across all cable news channels and major broadcast networks. Streaming platforms will carry it as well, including Paramount+ and the division’s free service CBS News 24/7. The 90-minute debate will have two four-minute commercial breaks. Like the presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump, there will be no live audience.
Unlike the Sept. 10 presidential debate on ABC, the moderators will not fact-check the candidates for vice president during the proceedings on Tuesday. The moderators will give the candidates the chance to fact check each other. CBS News will also provide real-time fact-checking on its live blog and on social media.
The moderators are veteran journalists with long tenures covering national politics. O’Donnell has spent her most of her career in the Beltway and both she and Brennan have served as White House correspondents for CBS. They have both traveled the world extensively covering international stories for the network as well. (O’Donnell also spent five years as a co-anchor on “CBS This Morning.”)
The vice presidential debate in 2020, when Harris faced off against the incumbent Mike Pence, averaged 57.9 million viewers according to Nielsen. It was the second most-watched meeting of running mates in history.
Here’s what else you should know about the moderators:
O’Donnell, 50, was mentored by the late “Meet the Press” moderator Tim Russert. After a stint at the newspaper Roll Call, she worked in the Washington bureau as a correspondent for NBC and reported to Russert, who was bureau chief. She said she worked her Capitol Hill sources on the phone in her car before entering the newsroom each day because she knew if she ran into him he’d ask, “What do you know?”
She did her first TV show as a 10-year-old. O’Donnell’s father served as a military doctor and her family lived in several countries where he was stationed. During her years in South Korea, she hosted a program that taught English to locals.
She will have a new role after the election. O’Donnell is leaving the anchor chair at “CBS Evening News” after the election to become a senior correspondent focusing on long-form interviews and specials. O’Donnell will be succeeded by John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois, a local anchor at WCBS in New York.
Her big scoop: She is the first American television journalist to conduct a sit down interview with a pope. Her talk with Pope Francis aired on CBS in May.
Her husband is a top chef. O’Donnell is married to Geoff Tracy, who has two restaurants in downtown Washington, D.C., and one in Chevy Chase, Md. Food brought them together as they met in a cafeteria line when as students at Georgetown University. They married in 2001 and have three children.
Brennan, 44, started out as a business reporter. The Connecticut native and University of Virginia grad’s first job was at CNBC, where she was a producer on a program hosted by financial news commentator Louis Rukeyser. She spent six years covering global financial markets at Bloomberg news before arriving at the CBS Washington bureau in 2012.
Her life changed in 2018. Brennan was named the new moderator of “Face the Nation,” succeeding Dickerson on the venerable Washington-based program, shortly after she learned she was pregnant with her first child.
Her big scoop: In 2021, Brennan was the first to report that members of former President Trump’s cabinet discussed invoking the 25th amendment following the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol.
She knows Arabic. Brennan was a Fulbright-Hays Scholar and studied Arabic at Yarmouk University in Irbid, Jordan. As a college intern at CNN, she translated videotaped messages from Osama Bin Laden. She is raising bilingual children with her husband, Yado Yakub, a Syrian American who serves as a judge advocate in the Marine Corps.