Following Thursday’s vice presidential debate, reporters and campaign staffers played out a rite of debates that has been a staple of American politics since 1984. From one central location near the debate site, reporters immediately convey the “spin” and interpretation offered by campaign officials and politicians affiliated with the participants.

With Facebook, Twitter and a generally huge level of Internet connectivity, assessment can begin seconds after the debates start. Noting that, the Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone asked whether media outlets ought to stop using the “spin room” because the spin has already been done by the end of the debate.

That, however, is not the problem.

News outlets ought to set the agenda for public discourse by giving their readers, listeners and viewers the information they need to make informed decisions about the world. By playing host to any spin, they indulge the efforts of stage-managed political campaigns to distort the facts that were or were not invoked during the debate.

By interviewing partisans, they abdicate their responsibility to hold politicians accountable, by allowing the candidate  to show himself in the most favorable light, rather than exposing the facts behind the candidates and his ideas and demanding reconciliation. News media exist for the sake of the unadulterated truth, not for giving us the world as we wish it to be.

The duty of a journalist is more than summarizing dialogue and reporting it to the reader; it includes doing the research of fact-checkers and interrogating candidates until they reconcile their rhetoric with the facts, acknowledge their falsities and adjust their ideas or refuse to budge in the face of reality.

Spin rooms are unrealistic. One headline from Kentucky read: “In the spin room, campaigns compete to mold public perception of the debate.” Perceptions should be formed on an individual basis. After all, 51.4 million people watched the vice presidential debate, and 67.2 million watched the first presidential debate. To say those viewers cannot form their own judgments is insulting to them and our entire political process.

Surrogates for the candidates, such as Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., for Vice President Joe Biden and Rep. Aaron Schock, R-Ill., for Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who are the players in spin rooms, are not the candidates themselves and will not have to confront the same challenges the election winner will have to confront. As stand-ins, they are little better than scarecrows.

It is those reasons, not because of its diminishing utility in the face of technological advances, that require getting rid of the “spin room.”