Bill Press: Bad deal — how did CNN get rolled by Trump?

By January 2008, the Democratic primary field, which started out with eight candidates, had narrowed to Sens. Hillary Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.). With a debate between the two scheduled for Jan. 31 on CNN, the Obama campaign got to work. They sat down with CNN and negotiated the terms, including: Who would moderate the debate, how much time the candidates would get to answer questions, whether they would sit or stand and how audience members asking questions would be chosen.  

There was nothing wrong with those negotiations. In fact, they’re standard fare for every political debate or town hall. And no doubt such negotiations were part of the lead-up to last week’s disastrous CNN town hall with former President Donald Trump.  

The question everyone is asking is: How could CNN agree to terms that basically gave Trump an hour of prime time to repeat all the lies he has ever told and add a few more? Every journalist I’ve talked to agrees: You can’t ignore Donald Trump. You have to cover him. The key is: How do you cover him? CNN chose to do so in the worst possible way.  

CNN’s first mistake: agreeing to carry Trump live. Instead, CNN should have said: You want to come back on a network you’ve attacked for the last seven years? OK, let’s start with a 30-minute taped interview with an anchor of your choice. We’ll talk other options later. With a taped interview, CNN would have maintained control. In a live town hall, they lost it.  

CNN’s second mistake: Knowing Trump would lie repeatedly, why didn’t CNN confront him with videotape or graphic evidence that he was lying? One easy example is when Trump claimed he had ordered Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller to have 10,000 troops ready to deploy to the Capitol on Jan. 6, why didn’t CNN have moderator Kaitlin Collins play a clip of Miller testifying to Congress that, in fact, Trump gave no such order? I believe the late “Meet the Press” moderator Tim Russert would have.   

CNN’s third mistake: Who picked the audience? That crowd was not, as CNN promised, a representative audience of decided, undecided and independent Republican voters of New Hampshire. Instead, as former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said, CNN “went in the tank” for Trump — giving him a raucous crowd of 400 Trumpers who cheered everything he said, even when he called host Kaitlin Collins ‘a nasty person.’”  

CNN’s fourth mistake: Who screened the questions? In 70 minutes, Trump faced not one critical question from the audience. Granted, you didn’t expect a hostile question from fellow Republicans. But surely there was one audience member who could have asked the essential question: “Mr. Trump, I voted for you in 2016 and 2020, but I have a hard time voting for you again since you still won’t admit that you lost in 2020. Why should I?”   

CNN’s fifth mistake: They not only gave Trump an entire hour, they agreed to include Trump surrogates, election deniers former White House Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley and Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), on panels before and after the town hall — in effect creating the Foxification of CNN.  

The point is: Nothing that happened at CNN’s town hall with Donald Trump was accidental or spontaneous. It was all negotiated ahead of time. In effect, CNN turned over an hour of prime time to Donald Trump, agreeing to a format that made it virtually impossible to get at the truth.  

Even CNN insiders are wondering whether new president Chris Licht agreed to those terms out of incompetence, inexperience or a desire to get back on Trump’s good side. Either way, it doesn’t look good for CNN.   

Press is host of “The Bill Press Pod.” He is the author of “From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire.”