It claims to be the most trusted name in news. But on Wednesday it will devote an hour of prime time to a serial liar who sought to overthrow American democracy.
CNN’s live town hall with Donald Trump, the former US president, has been condemned by critics as a marriage of convenience: an ailing network looking to boost ratings and a disgraced 76-year-old candidate seeking rehabilitation.
For millions of voters not yet paying attention to the 2024 election, the show is likely to be a wake-up call: Trump is back and the current favourite for the Republican party nomination, despite two impeachments and one criminal indictment.
And for the US media, it could be a warning from recent history: will Trump exploit cable news’s insatiable thirst for spectacle and outrage, dominate political discourse and surf a wave of free publicity all the way to the White House?
“It’s clear to me that CNN and many other mainstream media outlets have not learned their lessons from covering Trump in 2016,” said Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump and pro-democracy group. “This, in my opinion, is once again giving him legitimacy at a time when he is more extreme, more out of control and his lies are more dangerous than ever.”
She added: “It seems as though the political media cannot quit him. Treating Donald Trump as though he is just like any other regular political candidate is a huge strategic mistake. It normalises his crazy and that’s partially how we got here in the first place. It is 2016 political Groundhog Day.”
Trump has always bragged, with some justification, that he is great for “ratings”. In 2015 Leslie Moonves, then head of CBS, infamously said the ascent of Trump “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS”.
Confronted with a choice between screening Republican candidates such as Jeb Bush and John Kasich, or Trump rallies with their inherent sense of anything-could-happen danger, TV producers went for thrills and eyeballs. They were criticised for training cameras on an empty podium as they waited for the businessman and reality TV star to speak.
The Hillary Clinton campaign grew frustrated as the candidate was constantly asked to respond to Trump’s latest shocking remark. By the end of the election campaign, Trump had been the beneficiary of the equivalent of $5bn in free advertising, according to the media tracking firm mediaQuant.
There was soul searching over whether journalists had been unwitting accomplices in his upset victory. Four years later, even as incumbent president, his campaign speeches received less coverage and more fact checking. Whereas his allegations about Clinton’s home email server gained traction in 2016, his conspiracy theories about Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s laptop fell flat in 2020.
Now, as America braces for a 2024 election that Trump has branded “the final battle”, the media faces its ultimate test. How should it cover a man who made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his four years in the White House, according to a Washington Post count, and whose “big lie” spurred a mob of his supporters to assail the US Capitol on 6 January 2021?
Dan Cassino, a government and politics professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey, said: “I would hope that there are lessons to be learned about not carrying non-news events live, not treating every speech from a candidate as being important. Fact checking is impossible if you’re showing fully live; showing it in pieces where there’s something newsworthy, and fact checking the spot, is certainly a better idea.
“The news doesn’t have to always report every allegation that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth. The biggest disservice that the news organisations did to the country in 2016 was to report breathlessly about the investigation of Hillary Clinton that turned out wasn’t anything. It takes a little to do proper fact checking or to put things in context.
Cassino added: “It’s not maybe about de-platforming so much as being circumspect and choosing what to cover. We talk about bias oftentimes in terms of how people cover things but the more important bias is in what you cover and I would hope that news organisations have learned something from that.”
There was an early glimpse of how approaches may vary after Trump, accused of making a hush money payment to an adult film star, last month became the first former US president in history to face a criminal charge. When he returned from court in New York to his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, Fox News and CNN aired most of his address live but MSNBC declined to show it. Host Rachel Maddow explained: “We don’t consider that necessarily newsworthy and there is a cost to us as a news organization of knowingly broadcasting untrue things.”
Now CNN will come under scrutiny for its ability to challenge Trump with tough questions and fact check him in short order. The event, at St Anselm’s College in Goffstown, New Hampshire, will be televised at 9pm on Wednesday and moderated by morning show anchor Kaitlan Collins. Trump will take questions from Republicans and undeclared voters who are planning to vote in the 2024 primary.
The town hall comes at a difficult moment for CNN after staff redundancies, the firing of longtime host Don Lemon and record low ratings. Chris Licht, its chairman and chief executive, told the Guardian at last week’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington that he had no regrets about taking up the job a year ago.
But Setmayer, a former Republicans communications director on Capitol Hill, said she is not holding her breath for rigorous fact checking during Trump’s town hall “within the absolute dumpster fire CNN has become in the Chris Licht era. It’s clear that the new ownership of CNN has an agenda to appeal to Trump voters at the expense of quality journalism.”
CNN declined to comment for this article but its political director, David Chalian, told Vanity Fair magazine: “We obviously can’t control what Donald Trump says – that’s up to him. What we can do is prod, ask questions, follow up and try to get as revealing answers as possible.”
Collins gained a reputation for sharp questioning of Trump during her time as a White House correspondent. Some media observers are determined to keep an open mind and judge CNN’s performance on its merits.
David Brock, president of Facts First USA, a bipartisan watchdog, commented: “So long as the the interview process is sufficiently tough and there is a fact check, at least on the back end, the more scrutiny of Trump the better.
“The danger is obviously that you have a repeat of 2016 where studies showed after the fact that a lot of the free air time that Trump got where he was not challenged clearly helped the campaign and helped elect him. Provided we don’t see a repeat of that kind of treatment, it’s fine and healthy. The public may see what they see and reach their own conclusions, provided that there’s sufficient scrutiny.”
Lanhee Chen, a fellow at the Hoover Institution thinktank at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, said: “He is going to have a platform regardless of who gives it to him and so, in my mind, it’s probably better if it is a journalist or a media institution that is committed to actually asking tough questions than one that’s not.
“I don’t subscribe to the general point of view that you don’t want to platform Donald Trump. It’s silly because he’s going to have a platform regardless.”
Trump’s love-hate relationship with CNN is second in its complexity only to his love-hate relationship with the New York Times newspaper. He never gave an interview to a CNN journalist while he was president but tweeted about its output often. He denounced the network as “fake news” and the “enemy of the people” and chafed under tough questioning by reporters such as Collins and Jim Acosta. He derided Licht’s predecessor, Jeff Zucker, and encouraged his supporters to chant “CNN sucks!” at rallies.
Although Trump has been interviewed by Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson in recent weeks on Fox News, holding first town hall-style event of the 2024 campaign on CNN could be an attempt to draw a contrast with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, his chief rival for the Republican nomination, who has eschewed the mainstream media in favour of rightwing echo chambers.
Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: “It’s kind of amazing because one of the things about [Trump] is that he never, ever tried to expand his base. Going to CNN would certainly be expanding his base and the question is, boy, what does he do on that town hall? Does he do his usual crazy stuff or does he try to look more like a serious presidential candidate?”
She added: “The ratings, I suspect, will be through the roof just because of the curiosity of it. Which Donald Trump shows up? Is it the crazy conspiracy theorist or is it somebody who’s trying to actually run for president?”
Even if Trump makes an obvious blunder that can be seized on by Biden, DeSantis and other rivals, it might cause panic among his campaign team but is unlikely to elicit any regrets from a man who has been called a “world class narcissist”.
“You know the old saying no publicity is bad publicity: Trump surely believes that,” said Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington.
