A Moment of Truth for Presidential Debate ModeratorsThe 1976 Democratic presidential nominee Jimmy Carter, left, and President Gerald Ford, during their second debate in October of that year. TERESA ZABALA / THE NEW YORK TIMES

 The 1976 Democratic presidential nominee Jimmy Carter, left, and President Gerald Ford, during their second debate in October of that year.
TERESA ZABALA / THE NEW YORK TIMES

If this hasn’t been the worst year ever for truth in politics, I can’t think of what was. Nor can anyone tell me.

The Republican presidential nominee has produced more falsehoods than the major fact-checking sites have identified from a major presidential candidate since they came into existence. The Democratic nominee hasn’t come anywhere close to that. But she’s not exactly dwelling in Honest Abe territory, either.

It’s almost at the point where “truthiness” — Stephen Colbert’s old word for the from-the-gut canards that helped to lead to the Iraq war — would be preferable to what we have now: unsubstantiated nonsense and outright lies. In too many cases, they have taken hold as the basis for people’s voting decisions.

Traditional journalism has struggled to keep up with it all. It has been overwhelmed by the legion of assertions that scream out for fact-checking; undercut, at times, by journalists’ human failings and the economic imperatives of ratings and page views; and under siege from partisan attacks intended to bully it out of doing its job.

The good news is that the debates are finally upon us, providing the fourth estate with a great chance to set the record straight and to nudge the presidential discussion onto the level ground of established facts. In other words, a chance to live up to its calling.

And, yes, that is going to require the debate moderators to interject with the truth when either candidate makes an obviously false statement.

Inexplicably, the pre-debate debate has been dominated by the question of whether it is within the debate moderators’ purview to do that.

Donald J. Trump has said, as he did on Thursday on “Fox & Friends,” that the NBC anchor moderating Monday’s debate, Lester Holt, should stay out of the way and leave it to him and Hillary Clinton to “take each other on” over the facts.

Not surprising. But at least one of this year’s moderators, Chris Wallace of Fox News, said the same thing, as have some well-known television-news graybeards like the former PBS anchor Jim Lehrer, once a regular debate moderator himself.