How to know if CNN’s Trump town hall succeeds

On the choice to put the former president on live TV.

Is putting Donald Trump on television a terrible idea? Michael Fanone says it is. Fanone, a CNN contributor, was serving as a police officer during the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. He writes in Rolling Stone: “Putting him onstage, having him answer questions like a normal candidate who didn’t get people killed in the process of trying to end the democracy he’s attempting to once again run, normalizes what Trump did. It sends a message that attempting a coup is just part of the process.”

Media critic Margaret Sullivan agrees. “Airing Trump live like this is a terrible idea,” she writes, saying that letting him spread his “inevitable lies” is “not a good idea for democracy.”

I interviewed Trump on NPR in 2022, and think there are two separate issues to consider. The first is whether to cover a person or subject, and the second is how to cover them.

On the first question I have no doubt. Trump is a former president, the leader of a movement, and the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. Choosing not to cover him because you believe he is dangerous would be like choosing not to cover a hurricane because you don’t like the weather. Ignoring the storm will increase, not decrease, the danger to people in its path. And when you cover a political figure, an interview is one of many tools available for journalists to use.

This applies to people both at home and overseas. I have interviewed Iranian presidents, Chinese diplomats, a Nigerian warlord, the Taliban defense minister, a crime boss in a Venezuelan prison, and radical Libyan gunmen who said they wanted to kill Americans. If you think they are dangerous, you have even more need to keep track of them than otherwise.

It’s understandable for people to worry that “the media” are “normalizing,” “giving a platform to,” or “platforming” immoral leaders. Sometimes this concern reflects the study of extremist groups: the more attention extremists receive, the more easily they can recruit. This research is persuasive enough that interviewing some people is a hard call.

But the “normalizing” argument can go too far. It’s a little like the case for progressive language: essentially that if you say the right thing, and avoid saying the wrong thing, you will prevent harm. This has limitations. You may call a homeless person a “person experiencing homelessness,” so long as they do not object, but they’re still homeless. George Packer argues that such language softens and blurs the very issues that demand sharp focus.

Something similar can happen with news coverage, and critics said it happened with Trump during his presidency. Activists urged cable television networks to stop covering Trump rallies and speeches live, because it was impossible to fact-check the lies and distortions. Some networks eventually complied! Reporters would listen to hours of Trump’s monologues and report one sentence that seemed coherent or newsworthy to them, leaving the rest alone. But it began to seem that this was “normalizing” Trump. Critics said he sounded sanitized.

Susan Glasser, a leading chronicler of Trump’s Washington, wrote of watching six Trump events in a month in 2018 and concluding that it was a “mistake” not to experience Trump in full: “The problem is that there are so many outrages, we are in danger of ignoring them, or dismissing them as mere spectacle.”

So you can’t just ignore a political leader; and this brings us to the question of how to cover Trump. It’s certainly not necessary to interview any political figure every day. It may not be necessary to interview some of them at all. But it’s important to know what they are doing, and also to understand what they are saying—what case they are making to their followers.

When an interview is called for, it’s often better not to conduct it live. This allows time for reflection; journalists can think about how best to present it with proper context so the audience knows what’s going on. This may serve the guest as well as the audience! If the guest says confusing or unclear things in the interview, there is a chance to clarify them. As a journalist, I’d much rather do that when I can.

Of course I also talk to people live, as the news often requires. When a network decides on a live broadcast, it’s a high-wire act, because the journalistic requirement is the same. The interviewer needs to be the “narrator” of the event, and make sure the guest does not take over. In its town hall meeting, CNN will need to find some way to put Trump’s words in context, whether that means correcting a misstatement, explaining what something means, or noting what was left out. All this would be true for a town hall meeting with any presidential candidate.

Most important, the coverage needs to be proportional. No one candidate should be the dominant voice on a major news network, setting its agenda and commanding its airwaves. The audience needs to hear other candidates, as well as many other voices and sources of information about them, and about the country they propose to lead. The network will need to use all the other reporting tools at its disposal. If, over time, the town hall meeting is part of ongoing coverage that gives people the clearest possible idea of who Donald Trump is and what he stands for, that will be a success. If not, not.

Thanks for reading Differ We Must, my effort to explore modern versions of the dilemmas Abraham Lincoln faced when dealing with people who disagreed with him. I tell Lincoln’s life story through his meetings with people who differed in my book Differ We Must, due out Oct. 3, and I hope you’ll pre-order here.