‘Spectacle of lies’: the blowback from CNN’s town hall with Donald Trump

CNN would have hoped to make headlines when it decided to do a primetime town hall with Donald Trump, but the network did not expect to become the story — let alone to offer blow-by-blow coverage of its own handling of the interview.

In its Reliable Sources newsletter, columnist Oliver Darcy took his employer to task for allowing Trump to “abuse” the platform CNN had given him. “It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,” Darcy wrote after the broadcast.

Darcy also linked to more than a dozen reactions from journalists and media commentators about the Trump interview, most of them critical. “This is CNN’s lowest moment as an organisation,” said one, by veteran journalist James Fallows.

Then, after a news cycle dominated by the CNN-Trump story, veteran presenter Anderson Cooper took to the air on Thursday evening to offer withering criticism of the former president — while also offering a defence of the network’s decision to cover him.

“Many of you think CNN shouldn’t have given [Trump] any platform to speak and I understand that anger about that,” Cooper said. “You have every right to be outraged today and be angry and never watch this network again. [But] do you think staying in your silo and only listening to people you agree with is going to make that person go away?”

The intense public soul-searching at CNN this week also reflected the internal battles that have been raging at the network for the past year.

Following Discovery’s $44bn acquisition of CNN parent Warner Media last year, chief executive David Zaslav has sought to reposition the cable news pioneer as a less “activist” network than it had been in the Trump years — a stance that has left some employees wondering where the new lines were.

“When we do politics, we need to represent both sides,” Zaslav told CNBC last week as he defended the decision to have Trump on the network. “I think it’s important for America.”

On Wednesday, presenter Kaitlan Collins sought to fact-check Trump as he rolled off a number of false or inaccurate statements, including assertions that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that he had tried to stop the January 6 assault on the US Capitol. “The election was not rigged, Mr President,” she told Trump.

But other network presenters, who appeared to be stunned when the town hall was over, admitted that it was impossible to fact-check everything Trump said in real time.

After Collins asked Trump about his removal of classified documents from the White House, Trump called her “a nasty person”. He called the writer E Jean Carroll, who successfully sued him for defamation and assault, a “whack job”, drawing laughter from the crowd.

Critics have attacked CNN for the composition of the largely Republican or Republican-leaning audience, saying it sometimes felt like one of Trump’s combative rallies. “CNN did not have to have an audience, and they did not have to do it live,” said Marty Kaplan, a professor of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. “In no way could CNN have expected anything different from that set-up than what they got.”

In comments to staff on Thursday morning, Chris Licht, the network’s chief executive and former head of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, countered by saying that “America was served very well by what we did last night”.

The network also got a modest boost in the ratings. According to Nielsen, 3.3mn viewers tuned in to the Trump town hall — much better than the 535,000 it averaged during primetime in the first quarter. Still, it was lower than a town hall CNN held with President Joe Biden last year that reached 3.7mn viewers.

CNN’s viewership reached a yearly average of 1.7mn in the election year of 2020, but the network has lost ground since then. By last year the figure had dropped to 687,000 viewers in prime time, compared to 2.2mn for Fox and 1.1mn for MSNBC.

Kaplan says CNN may be seeking to reach some “persuadable” Fox viewers to increase its ratings, but he said this could be a “foolish” mission given the partisan divides in the US.

There has been perennial speculation that CNN may be put on the block, especially as more US viewers cut the cable “cord”. But Zaslav and John Malone, the billionaire cable pioneer who sits on the Warner Bros Discovery board, have rejected the notion that CNN should be sold or spun off.

Malone has been a champion of repositioning CNN, saying in 2021 that he wanted to see the network “evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with”. Zaslav and Licht have spent much of the past year trying to accomplish that goal while also doing some heavy cost-cutting.

CNN declined to comment.

Licht’s tenure has been marked by difficulties. His first big assignment was killing CNN Plus, a $300mn streaming project that had been conceived under the previous owner, AT&T. More recently, his talent shuffles — moving the Trump critic Don Lemon from a night-time slot to a morning show — have sometimes been fraught. Lemon was fired last month.

Now Licht’s critics can point to another flashpoint while he said the backlash was “absolutely expected” in his comments to staff on Thursday.

“I am aware that there have been people with opinions [and] backlash, and that is absolutely expected,” he said, pointing to the upside of the Trump town hall. “People woke up and they know what the stakes are in this election in a way they didn’t the day before.”