Follow for live updates on the Trump CNN town hall meeting.
Should a leading presidential candidate be given the opportunity to address voters live on television?
What if that contender is former President Donald J. Trump?
Mr. Trump will appear on CNN in front of a New Hampshire town hall on Wednesday night — his first live appearance on a major TV news network (besides the one controlled by Rupert Murdoch) since 2020 — and a torrid media debate swirls.
Joy Reid, an anchor on rival MSNBC, derided the event as “a pretty public CNN attempt to push itself to the right and make itself attractive and show its belly to MAGA.” Her colleague Chris Hayes called City Hall “very difficult to defend.” Critics asked why CNN would provide a live platform to someone who defended rioters at the Capitol and still insists the 2020 election was rigged.
Those concerns intensified on Tuesday after Mr Trump was found liable for sexual assault and defamation of writer E. Jean Carroll. “Is @CNN still going to do a town hall with the sexual predator twice accused of being insurgent?” Alexander S. Vindman, the army colonel who witnessed Trump’s first impeachment trial, wrote on Twitter.
Mr. Trump is also currently the Republican nominee with the most votes in the 2024 presidential campaign and the de facto leader of his party. Some veteran TV journalists wonder: What’s the alternative?
“So no more live political events, because politicians can be mean? Because politicians can lie? Ted Koppel, the former “Nightline” anchor, said in an interview. “I’m not sure that news organizations should necessarily engage in making ideological judgements. Is he a legitimate object of news attention? Sure.”
Wednesday’s town hall, where Mr. Trump will answer questions from Republican and undecided voters, is, in a way, a stress test — and a disturbing preview — for the television news industry as it prepares for a presidential contest likely to be in its early stages. stages at least, to prominently include Mr. Trump.
Any broadcast featuring the former president is sure to be divisive. Were the anchors too hard? Too mild? How quickly did they respond to false claims? And enemies of Mr. Trump will cringe if they see him on the air at all.
But longtime CBS anchor Bob Schieffer said interviews with key political figures were necessary. “There’s no doubt he could get the nomination,” he said of Mr. Trump. “It’s our job to tell people who’s running for what and what they stand for.”
CNN was criticized in 2016 for giving Trump hours of unfettered airtime during the Republican primary. Jeff Zucker, the network’s president at the time, later admitted that he overdid it.
Mr. Trump then spent years vilifying the network by leading chants of “CNN sucks” and barring his correspondent Jim Acosta from entering the White House. A YouGov poll last month found CNN to be the most polarizing major media source in the country, with the widest gap between the proportion of Democrats who trust it and the proportion of Republicans who do not.
Mr Trump last appeared on CNN in 2016 and a lot has changed since then. CNN was acquired by Warner Bros. Discovery and Mr. Zucker was replaced; his successor, Chris Licht, promised to increase the network’s appeal. He is backed by David Zaslav, Warner’s CEO, who brushed aside Wednesday’s objections to Trump’s town hall.
“The US has a divided government; we need to hear both voices,” Mr. Zaslav said on CNBC last week, where he was questioned repeatedly about the decision to host Mr. Trump. “When we do politics, we have to represent both sides. I think it’s important for America.”
Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has soured on Fox News, irked by Mr. Murdoch’s support of a potential Republican rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. And he’s taken note of Mr. DeSantis’ aversion to appearing on mainstream outlets like CNN.
Mr. Trump and CNN are not exactly reconciled. There’s the inconvenient fact that Mr. Trump still has a $475 million defamation lawsuit against the network pending. And in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday, the former president told fans that CNN was “deservedly desperate for those fantastic (TRUMP!) ratings.” He added: “It could be the start of a new and vibrant CNN, with no more fake news, or it could be a disaster for everyone, including me. Let’s wait and see what happens?”
As olive branches go, it felt a little spindly. But David Chalian, CNN’s political director, shrugged. “We never stopped beating him as president, despite everything he said about us,” Mr Chalian said in an interview. “We never stopped our work.”
CNN executives will broadcast Mr Trump’s remarks live, without any delay. That means if Mr. Trump makes a false claim, it’s up to the moderator, Kaitlan Collins, or an image on the screen to correct him in real time. Mr. Trump’s last three interviews on Fox News were pre-recorded. (Fox recently paid $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems after several anchors amplified Mr. Trump’s untruths about the company.)
In the interview, Mr. Chalian that CNN “does live news events — that’s what we do.” He added: “Obviously I can’t control what Donald Trump says, but what we can control is our journalism.”
CNN did not agree to terms for the town hall, Mr Chalian said – “No question is off the table” – and Ms Collins spent several days preparing for the broadcast. Selecting Ms. Collins to moderate is in line with Mr. Licht’s emphasis on reporting over knowledge; Ms. Collins is best known for her daily coverage of the White House and previously worked at The Daily Caller, a conservative outlet.
Mr Koppel said in the interview that Ms Collins was a “tough and able” journalist who could handle Mr Trump in a live setting. He said CNN had many reasons to go ahead with the event.
“Has Trump pushed the boundaries of honesty, good taste, decency and humanity to such an extent that we shouldn’t be putting him on the air at all unless we’ve had a chance to sanitize what he has to say?” said Mr. Koppel. “I understand that’s a reasonable question. But it puts a very heavy burden on the people who run our networks. Because it means we let them decide who gets on the air and who doesn’t.”
