CNN Trump "Town Hall" an epic mistake.
Normalizing Trump the price we're paying for CNN's ratings putsch.
CNN’s so-called Town Hall with Donald Trump and hosted by CNN reporter Kaitlin Collins in New Hampshire was so horrendous, it cannot go in passing. It must be witnessed for what it was: at worst, a terrible mistake in that it gave the biggest threat to American democracy a stage on which to spout lies that threaten our ability to remain a free society.
The Washington Post described it as “a firehose of old and new false claims” while the New York Times called it, a “fusillade of falsehoods,” that came “too quickly for…Kaitlin Collins to intervene.”
Wake up, again!
At best, last night serves as a wake up call to a nation that may have forgotten what it was like to have this man as president. That’s when Americans like me woke up daily – assuming we were able to get any sleep the night before – wondering what new horror was in store.
And there were many: a runaway virus with a gelded public health structure to deal with it; a man who accepted Russia’s help to get elected and prostrated himself on the world stage to its dictator-leader, Putin; an American president extorting an ally, Ukraine, to rig an election while it needed our weapons to protect themselves from Russian annihilation; a trip to NATO headquarters where he threatened the organization with dissolution, etc., etc.
What CNN wants
I get that CNN is trying to reassert itself to become again its original charter as a middle-of-the-road fat pipe, as the kids would say – a purveyor of straight news in contrast to its two biggest rivals – Fox “News” on the right and MSNBC on the left. But with Fox’s talent and ratings problems, its closest competitors not stepping up yet to fill the gap, and MSNBC sitting comfortably on the left, CNN may be wanting to pick off viewers from Fox and the right. Hence, last night’s Town Hall.
And CNN’s ratings are abysmal. According to Nielsen ratings, in March the wounded Fox still ranked on top with an average 2.09 million viewers; MSNBC came in second with 1.14 million, but continues to grow its ratings, its prime time hosts often surpassing their Fox and CNN competitors; and CNN came in a distant third with 473,000.
The biggest dipper
Yet a time when it looks as if 2024 will see a square off again between the 2020 candidates Biden and Trump, the three cable stations have seen dips in viewership, with the dinged Fox seeing the greatest with a 27 percent drop in viewers. MSNBC saw less than half of that with a 12 percent dip. But CNN saw 61 percent of its viewership tanking. Ouch.
So, I guess desperate times require desperate measures. According to the Associated Press (AP), under CNN’s new president Chris Licht, parent company Warner Brothers sees its chief goal as “rebuilding trust as a non-partisan news brand.”
Wants to peel off viewers from the right
According to the AP report, “CNN preaches patience as ratings tank during turnaround,” the “trust” the cable channel is seeking appears to be focused on re-attracting viewers from the right, as opposed to the left side of the political spectrum, which it may be ceding to MSNBC.
The AP added that this tack to the right occurs, “after years of criticism by former president Donald Trump and his followers, at a time when Fox and MSNBC have profited handsomely by appealing to specific points of view.”
So, the “Town Hall”
So perhaps it was no surprise that CNN began wooing right-wing voters with last night’s town-hall-style meeting featuring the twice impeached, insurrectionist plotting, sexual abusing Donald Trump.
But, c’mon. As bad an idea as it is to provide a stage for an existential threat to democracy, CNN needed to show some journalistic backbone. Open up the audience to members of all sides of the political spectrum. Fact check in real time with each false Trump assertion via visuals or expert refutations to his lies.
The dog biscuit that never came
Instead, CNN rolled over. Sure, CNN featured perhaps its best reporter, Kaitlin Collins, who has aggressively challenged Trump and his spokespeople at White House press briefings, to act as moderator.
Yet if four years of the Trump presidency has taught us anything, it’s that relying on traditional fair-minded journalistic methods, in the hands of a lone reporter, no less, will be and was no match for Donald Trump.
Old tropes never die
For example, one of Collins’ opening questions asked if Trump could just acknowledge that Joe Biden won the election. Predictably, Trump dragged out the same well-worn response we’ve been hearing for almost three years: the election
was rigged.
When Collins tried to assert that the “courts and Republican election officials all found th–”, Trump interrupted, spewing more lies about the “rigged election” with carnival barker confidence. And, because the audience was filled with Trump supporters, he was rewarded with cheers and applause, fueling Trump and his message across millions of American homes.
American dystopia to come: a snapshot
It went downhill from there. Questions from the audience continued to give the former president the platform to sell the dystopian future a Trump presidency would bring to America:
Q: What about the debt ceiling?
A: Might as well let it go to default.
Q: Would you pardon Jan. 6 insurrectionists?
A: Yes, except, maybe, for a few.
Q: Do you think you owe Mike Pence an apology?
A: No, because he did something wrong.
Q. Will there be a nation-wide abortion plan?
A: I’m proud of getting rid of Roe v. Wade.
Q: What would you do to bring down inflation?
A: “Drill, baby drill.”
Also, of note, when a question was posed about Trump’s conviction as a sexual abuser in the E. Jean Carroll trial, Trump doubled down on his “I never knew this whack job woman” and “This was a witch hunt” tropes, followed by boos toward Carroll and applause for Trump.
Getting our attention
If there were a bright side to last night’s dim-witted debacle, it was the kind of clarity that comes from a smack on the middle of the forehead by a
two by four plank.
The Biden-Harris campaign issued a statement warning Americans: this is what’s at stake in ‘24. Media mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg vowed “all the resources Joe Biden needs” to make sure Donald Trump never again becomes president, according to today’s Financial Times. USA Today editor Susan Page said this morning, “there was very little there to attract American suburban women’s votes.”
Call the networks
Networks other than CNN and Fox must be recalculating the loss of journalistic prestige and increase in danger to the nation by trying to copy CNN’s “Town Hall” monstrosity. Let’s hope … and call them, to make sure.
ABC: 800-230-0229
CBS: 888-274-5343
NBC: 800-952-5210
Clean Slate
The online magazine Slate is not exactly a mainstream news source, although it is a fair one. I turned to it this morning for its take on last night’s Trump-induced nightmare. Its “Donald Trump’s CNN Town Hall Was a Disaster” by Justin Peters, said something for both CNN and the rest of us to contemplate:
The article chastised Licht and CNN for their not having learned anything from the last seven years and its “doomed plans to restore the network’s fortunes by tacking to the imagined middle.”
Aiming for a “balance between left and right…requires pretending that today’s Republican Party is basically normal.
Screaming into the sofa
“The rest of us are reduced to screaming into our sofa cushions as we flash back to 2015 and the credulous media coverage that kickstarted our still-going national nightmare.”
Fool’s errand
While CNN’s betrayal of journalistic ethics by giving Trump a platform knowing full well he’d spew lies may be understood as a plot to boost ratings, it cannot be countenanced as a good plan for them or us.
Trump used CNN as his whipping boy throughout the four years of his presidency. Trump’s followers aren’t likely to give up their first loyalties to true alt-right media – Fox, News Max, ONN, or now Tucker Carlson and Twitter TV – when given a chance.
So CNN’s wooing the alt-right to boost ratings is a fool’s errand. Trump followers have other options. And CNN’s playing it straight down the middle or tacking right won’t cut it as America faces a do–or-die crisis now and
throughout 2024.
–trg