Yahoo News:
CNN’s highly anticipated town hall with Donald Trump on Wednesday night
renewed long-standing questions about how to cover the former president
without simply allowing him to peddle falsehoods on a national platform.
Those questions are becoming more urgent as Trump’s campaign recovers
from last November’s lackluster rollout of a new White House campaign.
Hosted by anchor Kaitlan Collins, a former White House reporter and a
rising star at the network, the event came as Trump appeared to be
consolidating his position as the GOP frontrunner. In the audience sat
undecided voters from New Hampshire, a crucial early-primary state.
But there was little effort from the former president to demonstrate
that he had been chastened by his loss in 2020 and was intent on running
a more disciplined campaign in 2024.
Instead, he engaged in his usual lies about his loss to Joe Biden while
also mocking the judgment against him earlier this week in a Manhattan
sexual assault civil suit brought by writer E. Jean Carroll. He claimed
that he could end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours and suggested that
the way to prevent school shootings was to arm teachers.
And for good measure, he insulted Collins, calling her a “nasty person.”
Questions about CNN’s judgment
Eight years after Trump launched his first presidential campaign, the
question of how to cover the master of attention-getting remains
unresolved. He is clearly not the sideshow that some dismissed him as in
2015 (he did, after all, win the presidency in 2016), but in the wake
of the Jan. 6, 2021, deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol, there are
legitimate questions about how to properly cover a candidate routinely
given to make incendiary statements, not to mention transparently false
ones.
CNN chief executive Chris Licht has been intent on making the network
more appealing to moderates and even conservatives since the Trump
presidency, and Wednesday night’s town hall was clearly an effort to
appeal to voters who might otherwise have tuned in to Fox News.
But to some, simply letting Trump peddle falsehoods was a disservice to
the political process. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said on
Twitter that “CNN should be ashamed of themselves,” while Democratic
strategist Simon Rosenberg called on Licht to resign.
