CNN’s No Good Very Bad Incredibly Insufferable Totally Outrageous Town Hall
How CNN’s hyped Trump town hall became a journalistic disaster
Brief Note: For readers out there, from this article on, all pieces on my Substack (with a new name in place) will be brand-new articles from yours truly. I will be experimenting with different sections and styles over my long long break and hopefully come up with something and confirm it during the summer. Fair warning, some pieces in the Substack will include coarse language, which I will warn before any articles that involve them. But most importantly, I hope you enjoy my pieces!
What the hell just happened?
For the reader clueless about the whole ordeal, congratulations, you are living a happier life than I am. But what happened on CNN on Wednesday night is a catastrophic failure for journalism and important in gaining insight into the 2024 election.
CNN, one of the most renowned and credible news sources in the world, lost its last sheds of credibility and integrity with the morning host Kaitlan Collins moderating a town hall with New Hampshire Republican voters, who will be one of the first groups of people to vote on the presidential primaries, asking questions to the former US President Donald Trump. And there is one big question hanging on everybody’s minds before the town hall, why?
After all, Trump not only denied the 2020 election and led a mob of his supporters to storm the US Capitol, which undermined democracy. He is under multiple investigations, including one by New York District Attorney Alvin Brag that led to his arrest last month. And just a day before the town hall, a jury finds Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation and awarded E. Jean Carroll five million dollars. More importantly to CNN, Trump demonized the news organization as the enemy of the people, clashed with one of its reporters Jim Acosta, and recently sued CNN last year for defamation. So why on Earth does the news company want to interview this person now?
Simple, it’s the ratings. Many cable news channels like CNN have seen a massive decline in ratings and many news corporations are willing to do anything for a ratings boost. And it’s important to know the timing, CNN placed its town hall at eight p.m. Coincidentally, just a few weeks ago, that time spot was occupied on Fox News by, any guesses? Tucker Carlson! And after his ouster from Fox News, even the right-wing news channel saw a stark decline in ratings. An argument can be made that CNN, spotting a group of disaffected Tucker viewers losing their favorite propagandist and hungry for pro-Trump content, wants to get a slice of the cake. By platforming a misogynistic President weeks after they fired a misogynist anchor, executives like Chris Licht (who is the chairman) of CNN saw an opportunity and were willing to seize it.
To put it mildly, it didn’t bold well. Here are the highlights from Trump’s one-night stand-up comedy act and additional improv special: Just seconds in he started lying about the 2020 election results as “rigged,” blamed the January 6 riots on Nancy Pelosi, called a black Capitol policeman a “thug,” argued that the US should default on the national debt, claimed Democrats are executing babies up to nine months in age through abortion, blamed his border separation policy on Obama, boasted that he will end the war in Ukraine in under 24 hours while not openly saying which side he supports, does not call Vladimir Putin a war criminal, lied about his stolen classified documents, and in the end claimed he will only accept the results of the 2024 election if they were honest, the same argument he made for the results of the 2016 and 2020 elections.
In addition, the audience CNN chose showed how fully pro-Trump and biased they are. As Trump discussed the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit, the former President called her a “whack job” while boasting and joking about sexual abuse and rape. Instead of booing or even objecting to such horrible words, the audience laughed and even applauded at reprehensible remarks that years ago will stop anybody running for any form of office from running ever again. Even more, seven out of the nine constituents that asked Trump voted for him in the 2020 election, not as undecided as many had thought.
Kaitlan Collins didn’t do a great job either. During the town hall, she was robotic and dull, many times unable to fact-check or point out errors and logical fallacies Trump had made. Even if Collins attempted to make a counterpoint or push the former President to further explain his response, he bulldozed through her questions with the typical blaring noise he makes that never stopped throughout the one-hour event. It was a journalistic failure that Collins is unable to put Trump under account, but that was not her fault. If you have seen Trump’s performance in debates over the years, Gish Galloping was his style to victory and the town hall should be a signal to any Republican presidential hopefuls to stop their campaigns now or face the wrath of Trump in the primary debates.
In the end, it’s not Collins’ fault for the car crash of a town hall, it’s CNN’s fault. No matter if the interviewer is Kaitlan Collins, Mehdi Hasan, or Walter Cronkite, Trump will steamroll over the interviewer faster than a supersonic airplane. CNN had been warned and criticized for the town hall before it happened, and at any moment they could have stopped it. They could have cut the screen to static as soon as Trump lied about the validity of the election. They could have changed the program to the CNN morning show episode where Don Lemon made the “past her prime” comment when Trump started joking about sexual assault. Heck, after the first break ended, they could have changed the program to the Mother’s Day episode of Chibi Maruko Chan. Even more, even if they wrote on the banner: “Sister Sakiko deliberately made sister Maruko sad” as the younger sister cried out from the living room in one scene, it would have made less damage to the journalistic credibility of the organization than running the town hall!
Inside CNN, very few have openly criticized the decision and the calamity it caused. In fact, the only opening dissenting voice that opposed the event was the former Capitol Hill policeman and (as of the time of writing) CNN contributor Michael Fanone. He wrote an op-ed criticizing the network and its executives for making the decision and wanted it to be published on the website. However, it was rejected by Licht who was directly criticized in the letter, and was published in Rolling Stone which the author recommends you read in full.
At this point, an argument can be made that criticism against CNN is unwarranted because this isn’t the first time Trump had had made such rhetoric, why is this one different? There is one reason: credibility.
Trump often spills his bile of division and reality denialism on his rallies, on news sites like Newsmax, and on his social media site Truth Social. But there is a default level of recognition viewers can instinctively make that the language propagated are hyper-partisan and false. CNN, by giving Trump the platform to do so, gives Trump the credibility he richly doesn’t deserve. His words are played live to a global audience and a domestic audience that were rightfully horrified at a man hijacking democratic norms and values the US prides itself in and spewing reprehensible nonsense that renders the country utterly divided and hopeless.
And hence, a reckoning needs to be made in the media establishment over how to treat actors like Trump. Modern journalistic standards don’t work on Trump, his loyal followers, and his supporters with a cult-like devotion to the man and are fully blind to any sense of reality. These people can counteract your facts and statistics with “facts” and nonsense because if there’s one rule in misinformation the author has learned, nonsense is much easier to make up than facts.
In recent years, mainstream media organizations have often invited far-right GOP members to their shows like they’re normal politicians with different political views. But instead of generating debate and showing the opinions of another side, it emboldens and normalizes the extremes. For example, a few weeks ago CBS News’ renowned program 60 Minutes interviewed notorious Qanon-believing congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and after she claimed Democrats like Joe Biden are pedophiles. After the episode was aired under massive criticism, the congresswomen tweeted again claiming Democrats are pedophiles.
Fun fact, among the people that criticized the 60 Minutes interview was CNN staff and anchors, a fact which was also mentioned in Fanone’s op-ed. so congratulations CBS News, you’re off the hook for journalistic malfeasance!
By looking at the backlash against CNN, all news media should review their practices and how they will prepare to cover the 2024 US presidential election. If there is one thing for sure, the town hall fiasco is not a bug, but it will be a feature of what’s to come.
In conclusion, I want to end with two quotes from Fanone’s op-ed:
Putting him onstage, having him answer questions like a normal candidate who didn’t get people killed in the process of trying to end the democracy he’s attempting to once again run, normalizes what Trump did. It sends a message that attempting a coup is just part of the process; that accepting election results is a choice; and that there are no consequences, in the media or in politics or anywhere else, for rejecting them.
It’s about ratings and money. Sometimes things are exactly as they appear, and this appears to be an attempt by a major media outlet struggling with its ratings to attract disenfranchised viewers. To me, allowing Trump an open forum on a major television news network is the moral equivalent of putting an AR-15 in the hands of someone mentally unstable. Whether words or bullets — and I have seen firsthand the effects of both — they are equally dangerous in the mouths or hands of those who have shown us time and time again what their true intentions are.
Ah, the degradation of media integrity...