Does CNN have a scandal on its hands?
According to tonight’s edition of Tara Palmeri’s PuckNews newsletter (sub.req.), CNN set audience ground rules for the Trump town hall which allowed audience members to cheer Trump but not boo him.
Here’s the key part of the interview with Matthew Bartlett (emphasis added)…
They did some warm up with the audience ahead of time. One of the questions was, Are there any conditions? And Kaitlan said, No, there are no conditions. And someone asked if [Trump] knew the questions ahead of time and she said he didn’t. I think a lot of people were prepared to ask questions. The floor manager came out ahead of time and said, Please do not boo, please be respectful. You were allowed to applaud. And I think that set the tone where people were going to try their best to keep this between the navigational beacons, and that if they felt compelled to applaud, they would, but they weren’t going to have an outburst or they weren’t going to boo an answer.
I don’t know what it looked like on camera, but when he was talking about certain things, whether it was the paper he took out of his pocket or on the tweets, I do feel as if he lost the audience, especially at times when he was litigating January 6th or the election. It just didn’t seem to resonate with everybody. There was a feeling of bewilderment. Again, there were plenty of people there that no matter what he said, they loved it. But there were plenty of people there with a healthy dose of New Hampshire Yankee skepticism, and were there to either talk, ask questions or to listen.
