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“I absolutely and unequivocally believe that America did a very good job of what we did last night,” CNN CEO Chris Licht told employees Thursday morning. It is said that Licht defends his programming decision and praises the journalist entrusted with hosting the event, while praising his network for live-streaming the town hall with Donald Trump. I just pushed through the claim. He argued that he was doing a public service to the public by broadcasting a number of clearly false and misleading statements by the leading 2024 presidential candidate. His comments implicitly challenged those who argue that providing Donald Trump with live TV shows undermines American democracy, including those employed by his own network. .
The central issue under discussion before the City Hall footage was televised was simple. Given Donald Trump’s propensity to lie, slander, mislead and insult, would it be in the public interest to give him the opportunity to be broadcast live on television? This issue can be rephrased as the ethics and morals of “platforming” the former president.
There is only one problem with this discussion. That is, the discussion is artificially limited. The question of “supporting” or “not supporting” Donald Trump is actually a false dichotomy. Alternatives to these two options of his exist, and some have been successfully adopted before.
As I’ve explained elsewhere, live TV interviews always favor those who like to lie. This is what scholars call media “affordances.” It’s not that an intelligent and persistent interviewer (think Ted Coppell in his prime) can’t effectively refute lies, it’s that the structure of this format makes unproven claims (and even It is a significant advantage for falsehoods to spread. As long as Trump’s Town Hall was live, Trump knew he would “win.”
This feature of live television is a well-known fact. Everyone in the industry already knows this, and it explains why many critics, academics, and TV insiders warned against the show before it aired.
But both proponents and opponents of the program took it for granted that the only possible format was live. Other options were always available to CNN and should have been publicly proposed, considered and discussed. Unfortunately for us, they weren’t.
One example: nothing stopped CNN from live-streaming City Hall last night exclusively on CNN.com. If so, viewers who were most enthusiastic about the live experience chose to watch the livestream video, and CNN sent the production version, including the editing and narrative tracks, to 60 minutesIt’s right after the -style package. Two different journalism modes for two different audiences were always an option. Taking this route would have allowed CNN to avoid accusations of bias while acting more journalistically. If the streamer service that was shelved by an organization called CNN+ still existed, the cable network might even be able to sell a ton of subscriptions on the program.
This is just one example of a better alternative than what happened Wednesday night. Others exist. There seems to be a strange amnesia about the ethical and professional interviews conducted with Donald Trump over the past few years. CNN’s Chris Wallace interviewed him for Fox News in 2020, and the veteran journalist did a great job of questioning him. When Leslie Stahl interviewed President Trump, 60 minutes In 2020, her disciplined interviewing skills proved too much for him and he resigned. Perhaps best of all, Jonathan Swann used the Australian version of the TV interview (nonsense is often quickly ignored, and exchanges are generally less respectful and more confrontational). When we introduced it to Axios, it spread in a big way.
What ties these three successful platforms of Donald Trump together? They were all videotaped and ready for later broadcast. But despite Trump and his followers complaining about the matter, interviewers agreed to allow Trump’s team to film the interview. So in each case it proved that the White House was able to produce and distribute its own version of what happened to compete with television production.
This seems like the most fair and ethical model for platforming Donald Trump. The news media shouldn’t be handing him a live mic or radio wave, but rather interviewing him while allowing his team to bring in the video production skills he feels he needs to protect himself.
These are just two ways to address platform challenges. Others undoubtedly exist. We need to discuss additional alternatives to find the best ways and models for serving democracy while acting responsibly. Debating whether to ‘join the platform’ or ‘not join the platform’ using live TV interviews as the only ‘platform’ is not only restrictive, but also a framework that encourages superficial rhetorical assertions on both sides. There is also. The “pro-platform” side can justify their position by pointing to viewer concerns and citizens’ “freedom of speech” arguments, while the “anti-platform” side can argue that their position is existential. It can be argued that it protects democracy from the threat of authoritarianism. Both sides make compelling arguments rooted in American values, but that leaves us at a dead end. So the discussion needs to go beyond them.
That’s why we need alternatives, especially as Trump’s 2024 candidacy adds urgency to the issue. Now that we know what happened live on CNN on the night of May 10, 2023, network TV executives in charge of journalism production claim plausible ignorance when addressing former president on airwaves you can’t. This isn’t him in 2015, not even 2020. These executives now have a record compiled for almost a decade showing his best practices on television and their failures.
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Wednesday’s Town Hall was the renewed spotlight on media limitations. TV fools us all the time. When we watch television, the images and sounds emitted from the screen shape our perception. The sensation is so immersive that we believe other people must be seeing the same thing we are seeing. Since the 1960s, however, we have learned that this is not true. Television is one medium, but it is not the only one involved. We forget how much each of us as viewers mediates our TV experience. We all see it collectively, but we experience it individually.
In this sense, television remains the national Rorschach test. Reactions to City Hall on Wednesday make it clear that even though we live in the same town and watch the same TV shows, we can come to diametrically opposed conclusions from what we see. In this sense, live political broadcasts, whether debates, interviews, or rallies, as Licht alluded to in his comments on Thursday, reveal and expose truths about television and us that we wish to keep hidden. Helpful. But we know we can do more when it comes to providing democratic citizens with accurate and verified information.and we should do it.
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