CNN bosses have defended their decision to host a prime-time town hall with Donald Trump, after triggering widespread outrage by allowing the former president to spout lies and disinformation on subjects from sexual assault to attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
Addressing staff anger over the decision to host the New Hampshire event, the CNN chief executive, Chris Licht, saluted what he called a “masterful performance” by Kaitlan Collins, the anchor who attempted to cope with Trump’s lies and abusive comments in front of a raucous Republican audience.
On an internal call on Thursday, Chris Licht reportedly told staffers: “You do not have to like the former president’s answers, but you can’t say that we didn’t get them.
“Kaitlan pressed him again and again and made news … Made a lot of news, [and] that is our job.”
Before the town hall, CNN said it was hosting Trump because he is the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination to face Joe Biden in the presidential election next year.
But the network saw widespread criticism for hosting the twice-impeached former president, who is under investigation for a litany of alleged crimes and civil offenses.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 criminal charges over a hush-money payment to a porn star. This week, he was found civilly liable for sexually assaulting and defaming the writer E Jean Carroll.
He also faces state and federal investigations for election subversion, federal scrutiny of his retention of classified information and a multimillion-dollar civil suit over his business and tax affairs.
Licht took over at CNN last year. He has faced widespread criticism for pursuing widespread changes in staffing and tone. His comments on a 9am editorial call on Thursday were reported by Brian Stelter, a media commentator and anchor who Licht pushed out of the network.
Licht reportedly said: “While we all may have been uncomfortable hearing people clapping, that was also an important part of the story.”
At St Anselm’s College in Manchester, members of an audience made up of Republican voters clapped when Trump denied assaulting Carroll and mocked her as a “whack job”, a day after he was found liable for assaulting and defaming her, and was ordered to pay her around $5m.
When Trump denied taking three hours to tell supporters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 to to go home, audience members applauded.
When Trump called Collins “nasty” and suggested she did not know what she was talking about, audience members laughed.
Licht reportedly told staffers the audience in New Hampshire, the state which will host the first Republican primary next year, represented “a large swath of America”, a reality much of the US media missed in 2016, when Trump shocked Hillary Clinton to become president.
According to Stelter, Licht also said covering Trump would “continue to be messy and tricky, but it’s our job”, adding: “America was served very well by what we did last night.”
Stelter said: “Many CNN employees strongly disagree.”
One employee, the media reporter Oliver Darcy, began the Reliable Sources newsletter he inherited from Stelter with stern words for his own network.
“It’s hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN Wednesday evening,” Darcy wrote.
Calling Collins “as tough and knowledgable of an interviewer as they come”, Darcy pointed to how she “fact-checked Trump throughout the 70-minute town hall” … repeating “that there was no evidence for the lies he was disseminating on stage.
“… Yet … Trump frequently ignored or spoke over Collins as he unleashed a firehose of disinformation upon the country, which a sizable swath of the GOP continues to believe.”
Reed Galen, a Republican operative turned co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, pointed to CNN’s retreat from the adversarial stance it maintained throughout Trump’s presidency.
He said: “Is anyone surprised by what we saw? If you are, you weren’t watching the last eight years. Thanks again to CNN who helped get us into this in 2016 and is now helping us get deeper into this in 2023.”
Galen also said Collins “probably tried the best she could, given the circumstances”.
But the anchor was not universally praised, critics pointing for example to her failure to correct or challenge Trump’s comments on abortion, including claiming Democrats support abortion at nine months and killing babies after they are born.
The Democratic House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, told MSNBC: “Donald Trump never met a lie that he doesn’t like or that he is unafraid to tell.
“The Democratic position on reproductive freedom is very clear. We support a woman’s freedom to make her own reproductive decisions. And it’s unfortunate that he was allowed to repeat those lies repeatedly without it being questioned, including by anyone in the audience, which was very disturbing.”
Also on MSNBC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a leading progressive congresswoman from New York, called the decision to host the town hall “profoundly irresponsible”.
Referring to Carroll, she said: “What we saw tonight was a series of extremely irresponsible decisions that put a sexual abuse victim at risk … in front of a national audience and I could not have disagreed with it more. It was shameful.”
