New Hampshire played host to, already, what many view as the most embarrassing and “disturbing” event (in the view of Anderson Cooper) of the 2024 campaign season thus far: CNN’s live town hall with former president Donald Trump. The struggling network, famous for its liberal tilt, has been bashed and thrashed by critics on the left (and even some on the right) for giving the former president a platform to espouse his norm-shattering views.
Chris Licht, CNN’s chairman, has been playing defense as this criticism mounts over how the event bordered on the unhinged.
On a network-wide editorial call, Mr. Licht congratulated moderator Kaitlan Collins on “a masterful performance” before speaking on the public backlash. “We all know covering Donald Trump is messy and tricky, and it will continue to be messy and tricky, but it’s our job,” Mr. Licht said, according to a recording of the call obtained by The New York Times.
“I absolutely, unequivocally believe America was served very well by what we did last night,” Mr. Licht added. “People woke up, and they know what the stakes are in this election in a way that they didn’t the day before. And if someone was going to ask tough questions and have that messy conversation, it damn well should be on CNN.”
Collins was not necessarily the problem with the broadcast; she definitely tried her best, has experience with Trump, and got kudos from no less than Peter Baker, arguably the greatest journalist to ever cover the American presidency. But she wasn’t enough to prevent Trump from dominating the event in ways that have come to define him, making false statement after false statement all night and pandering to his theme of “retribution” for the 2024 campaign. No matter how many times Collins told Trump the election wasn’t rigged, he kept saying it anyway, which is essentially the genius of Trump: he recognizes that his own version of reality is a product that will sell.
One of CNN’s greatest mistakes was thinking that Trump is a normal candidate whose reality more or less matches what’s actually true.
But perhaps the worst mistake was in picking an audience that clearly skewed right and lapped up all of Trump’s falsehoods and exaggerations. The audience being disproportionately Trump supporters, and nowhere near reflective of the New Hampshire electorate–much less the national electorate, set the tone. They applauded the president at many turns, asked him softball questions, and even laughed along with him at the expense of E. Jean Carroll, who was able to prove in the court of law that Trump was liable for sexual assault and defamation (and thus was a survivor of sexual abuse).
Carroll and her attorney are even weighing suing Trump again for what he said on the broadcast as the president has moved to appeal the order to pay her $5 million.
“Everything’s on the table, obviously, and we have to give serious consideration to it,” Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan told the New York Times about the prospect of a defamation lawsuit. “We have to weigh the various pros and cons and we’ll come to a decision in the next day or so, probably.”
In essence, the town hall was a Trump rally broadcast during prime time, with Trump’s combative and brash brand that endeared him to his followers on full display. In one poignant moment, Trump drew cheers from the partisan crowd after he called Collins “nasty” when she called him out for insisting the election was “rigged.”
Inexplicably, Licht went out of his way to defend those in the crowd who were supportive of Trump at every turn during the call.
“While we all may have been uncomfortable hearing people clapping, that was also an important part of the story,” Licht reportedly said, adding that those audience members represent “a large swath of America” whose story the media missed in 2015 and 2016.”
Internally, Licht is facing a tsunami of anger over the town hall, with staffers appalled at how the idea was even greenlit. The chorus to fire him is probably at an all-time high, with his approach to revive the network having been in the gutter well before this event. His CNN Primetime experiment has been a failure and just by reading why Licht was happy with the town hall–it “made a lot of news” according to his words on the call–is unbelievably telling of a desperation for any publicity at all. This is not a man who primarily wants to push the network to the center, as many have claimed, but instead, someone who is willing to sell his soul to see a ratings spike.
The American people lose when Trump is handed a delectable opportunity to speak on the public airwaves without being properly held to account.
A Warner Bros. Discovery insider offered words that ring hollow: “I think every news organization, every network, will be grappling with how to cover Trump. There’s no easy answer. CNN just came first.”
The truth is not that CNN was first: CNN was willing.
