Trump's team revels in town hall victory as CNN staff rages at 'spectacle of lies'
A couple of takes from this reporting: I'm coming to the point of view that Licht is more a lackey stooge who is in way over his head. He's one of those oily, amoral types you find in large organizations whose main talent is playing the system and sucking up. His ridiculous excuse for the disaster that it served democracy was not only self-serving but showed he doesn't have the faintest clue about our democracy - and really doesn't care anyway. His interaction with dump in the article illustrates that.
The other is that Collins is not some poor reporter who doesn't deserve blame but rather a Haberman-like tv personality who plays both sides.
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snip
Trump was not particularly concerned by whether the broadcast would get high ratings, though he told CNN’s chief executive, Chris Licht, backstage that he would boost their ratings, to which Licht nodded and said he should have “a good conversation and have fun”, two of the people said.
Trump’s advisers saw the town hall ultimately as a strategic win for the former president, who revelled in playing off the live audience of Republican and Republican-leaning voters in New Hampshire, which is hosting the first 2024 GOP presidential primary, and talked over the CNN moderator, Kaitlan Collins, as she tried to factcheck him in real time.
In stark contrast to the Trump camp’s jubilation, the mood inside CNN was dour amid widespread reports of internal disgust. The network’s own media reporter Oliver Darcy wrote in his newsletter on Wednesday that it was “hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN”. But the Trump campaign appears to have got what it wanted out of the CNN town hall in part because it negotiated the terms of the event with an unusual degree of leverage, according to multiple people familiar with how the planning unfolded.
Trump’s team also figured that CNN worked for its needs because it could have Collins as the moderator, a rising star who co-hosts the network’s morning show but has also remained on the Trump beat and has taken care to preserve her relationship with the ex-president.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/may/12/trump-town-hall-cnn-staff-rages
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