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CNN Labels Trump Town Hall Host a 'World-Class Journalist' After Event Totally Backfires

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CNN’s dumpster fire of a town hall with former President Donald Trump last week was supposed to be where moderator Kaitlan Collins Spoke Truth To Power™ and “fact-checked Trump in real time.”

The network’s brass hasn’t publicly budged from its position that that’s what happened, despite plenty of evidence — internally and externally — that this wasn’t the case.

Mind you, the Trump town hall on Wednesday was a victory of sorts for CNN, which pulled in 3.3 million viewers for the event — easily winning the time slot, according to Hollywood trade publication Deadline.

However, this is the thing about dumpster fires: They do tend to burn very brightly and people can’t help but to watch, but the damage left behind proves that not all attention is good attention. (They also tend to stink.)

It was good for Trump, who went away from the event unbowed and triumphant. Regardless of whether you believed that this was because “fact-checking in real time” didn’t work (leftist commentator Mehdi Hasan’s hypothesis) or that it actually looked more like a moderator trying to pick a fight with a former president over a set of issues most Republican primary voters don’t care about (the take if many on the right), the event showed the former president was still in top pugilistic form.

Mind you, the network still called Collins a “world-class journalist” in the wake of the town hall.

“Tonight Kaitlan Collins exemplified what it means to be a world-class journalist. She asked tough, fair and revealing questions. And she followed up and fact-checked President Trump in real time to arm voters with crucial information about his positions as he enters the 2024 election as the Republican frontrunner. That is CNN’s role and responsibility: to get answers and hold the powerful to account,” the network said in a statement, according to the news and entertainment site The Wrap.

Do you think Kaitlan Collins did a good job?

And yes, that’s not a joke. This wasn’t April Fools Day.

This was not an opinion held by many. As one Twitter user tweet in response to Puck News’ Dylan Byers posting the CNN statement: “That was no Town Hall. That was ‘The Kaitlan Collins Show.’ She made herself the star. Not the audience or Trump’s responses. It was all about Kaitlan, and we saw it.”

Figures on the left, meanwhile, portrayed Collins as a waif thrown to the wolves by CNN management, who apparently had no capacity to fend for herself amid what they tried to portray as an unprecedented barrage of lies:

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That was Hassan of MSNBC retweeting a commentary piece from the leftist news site Courier Newsroom. Yeah, lies like, um, these facts Trump pointed out about his tweets leading up to and on the day of Jan. 6, 2021:

Fact-check: Accurate.

Also accurate was this:

These interactions were pretty typical of the whole evening on Wednesday — or, as CNN officially called it, a “world-class journalist” doing her thing.

Yet, some of the loudest calls decrying what happened at the town hall came from inside CNN’s own house, such as a rant by Oliver Darcy — now essentially filling the role Brian Stelter had before he was fired — which included a compendium of nasty tweets about the town hall.

“It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,” Darcy wrote in piece that was published by CNN  the day after the town hall.

“Kaitlan Collins is as tough and knowledgable of an interviewer as they come. She fact-checked Trump throughout the 70-minute town hall. Over and over and over again, she told him that the election was not stolen. That it was not rigged. That there was no evidence for the lies he was disseminating on stage.”

And then there was Anderson Cooper.

The veteran broadcaster farcically apologized to CNN viewers for the fact that CNN was covering real news on occasion now and wasn’t just a safe space for lefty rage:

Again, this is the one time in CNN’s history the network has vigorously “fact-checked in real time” the statements that politicians made on stage. If CNN did this with the current president, he’d let out a loud “C’mon, man!”, then depart, stage far-left.

Indeed, CNN likely wouldn’t even do this to any other Republican. Wednesday night was bear-baiting at its finest and had little to do with the issues concerning voters going into 2024.

Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott, you name them — their Collins town hall won’t look like a rabid squirrel trying to pick an ideological fight with a human candidate.

But rest assured, CNN will call that “world-class journalism,” too.

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C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014. Aside from politics, he enjoys spending time with his wife, literature (especially British comic novels and modern Japanese lit), indie rock, coffee, Formula One and football (of both American and world varieties).
Birthplace
Morristown, New Jersey
Education
Catholic University of America
Languages Spoken
English, Spanish
Topics of Expertise
American Politics, World Politics, Culture




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