CNN chief learns all the wrong lessons from Trump ‘town hall’ – By Hunter (Daily Kos) / May 17, 2023
In a new story from CNBC, reporter Alex Sherman reports that inside CNN, company CEO Chris Licht has rewatched the tapes of the disastrous CNN-provided “town hall” feting Donald Trump last week and has privately expressed some regrets.
Not over hosting a new campaign town hall for Donald Trump, the first president to attempt a coup against the legitimate United States government, mind you. Licht has been very clear that he’s not about to run a “news” network that makes value judgments on whether or not the United States government ought to be overthrown, and neither regrets hosting a notorious and now proven-dangerous propagandist, nor regrets providing him with as fawning an audience as CNN could muster.
He just wishes his decisions, which were transparently doomed to failure from the moment they sputtered into existence in his head, had somehow produced “substance” despite everyone involved at CNN going to great lengths to make sure there would be as little “substance” as possible. And Sherman’s story shows that not only does Licht and CNN still not get it, but that the organization and the nation’s wider media doesn’t have a damn bit of knowledge about how they might cover political crises except as substanceless showboating.
