[jal278]

The difference between sports and debates are that the post-processing in sports isn't going to change the most important "outcome," i.e. who won.

But post-processing when it comes to debates can mean overlaying information on top of the video that identifies clear falsehoods -- undermining a candidate's ability to play fast and loose with the truth to win, knowing that there's no real penalty for doing so.

So the "winner" might emerge differently if for example, news agencies didn't publish the live video, but each agency did independent fact checking (if the video were under embargo) and then each published annotated and unannotated versions.

You could still watch the vanilla version if you wanted to, but at least there would be widespread access to factually vetted versions as well.