CNN Sets Republican Town Hall With Mike Pence; Dana Bash To Moderate

sit with CNN for a televised town hall discussion on Monday, this time moderated by Anderson Cooper. From the top, he was grilled about the second criminal indictment and 37 counts former president Donald Trump faces for taking hundreds of classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago estate after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic The departure of CNN’s Chris Licht, following his turbulent year atop the cable news network, places a pause on one of the great media stories of the decade so far. But even non-media-junkies can appreciate just how strange and how strenuously rocking had been Licht’s time at the network: It played out across screens. The trouble with being the place that invented the 24-hour news cycle is that those hours can come back to bite when you’re the story. There it was in politics, when Donald Trump’s “Town Hall,” with purported rising star Kaitlan Collins, gear-shifted into the first televised rally of the 2024 presidential cycle — with CNN’s air being used to depict an audience of Trump supporters cheering on his jibes. (No less an eminence than Christiane Amanpour, a CNN icon, registered her dissent in public.) There it was on the business pages, with Licht’s overseeing the dismantling of streaming product CNN+, on orders from Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaslav, setting the tone for his tenure. There it was at the Oscars, when Michelle Yeoh used her best actress acceptance speech to rebuke anchor Don Lemon’s bizarre on-air comments about a woman’s “prime” years. There it was in the gossip pages, after a Variety story about Lemon’s comportment toward his female co-anchors on the network’s flagship morning show, and then his ouster, leaked into the tabloids, and never seemed to be countered by any good news about the network. And, finally, there it was at length, with an all-access profile by the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta revealing Licht’s contempt for predecessor Jeff Zucker and the depths of his disdain for and, frankly, confusion about CNN’s mission.

Fox News Digital in a Wednesday report that posted just a couple of hours before Warner Bros. Discovery brass announced the ouster of CEO Chris Licht. David Zaslav handpicked Licht last April to replace Jeff Zucker, the successful but divisive longtime CNN leader ousted after disclosing an affair with one of his direct reports.

and was unhurt. Sean Hannity, who was hosting the town hall Thursday night, served up the incident as the first topic of the long Q & A session.“I want to start with the current president … did you see the video of when he fell?” Hannity began, diverging from a longstanding journalistic tradition of leading with the most important and relevant information.But Trump failed – at least by his own standards – to capitalize on the opportunity to trash and smear opponent.

South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, whose town hall will be moderated Jake Tapper and will air June 4 at 8 p.m. ET, and former Vice President Mike Pence, whose Dana Bash-moderated event will debut on the network on Wednesday, June 7 at 9 p.m.

a few days before on Sunday, June 4.Pence served as vice president under Donald Trump from 2017-2021. Like Trump he’ll face a friendly audience of mostly Iowa Republicans who have pledged to pre-register and participate in the Republican caucuses.

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley will participate in a live CNN presidential town hall next month in Iowa, the network said Wednesday. The announcement comes just weeks after the network held a town hall with GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, moderated by Kaitlan Collins, in New Hampshire.

E. Jean Carroll, the writer who won a $5 million sexual abuse and defamation civil lawsuit against Donald Trump earlier this month in Manhattan, is seeking what her lawyers call a “very substantial” additional amount in the wake of insulting comments the former president made during a May 10 CNN town hall.

Donald Trump wants more airtime on CNN and is proposing the news network a second town hall.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said CNN is rebuilding itself to be a news network that presents “both sides” of every issue rather than an “advocacy network” — comments coming as CNN continues to face a backlash over the town hall with Donald Trump last week. Zaslav, speaking at the MoffettNathanson Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in New York, said that previously the overall impression of CNN’s brand was “left-leaning.” That’s now changing, he said, citing a new YouGov poll finding an 11-point improvement in U.S. viewers’ trust in CNN. “Our view is, there’s advocacy networks on either side. We have the best journalists in the world. We need to show both sides of every issue,” he said.

Naman Ramachandran Christiane Amanpour has spoken out against Donald Trump’s recent CNN town hall, where he described moderator Kaitlan Collins as a “nasty person.” “We know Trump and his tendencies, everyone does, he just seizes the stage and dominates. No matter how much flack the moderator tries to aim at the incoming, it doesn’t often work. I would have dropped the mic at ‘nasty person,’ but then that’s me,” Amanpour said on Wednesday to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Amanpour was accepting the Columbia Journalism Award and delivering the school’s commencement speech. Amanpour, who is CNN’s chief international anchor, said she had met with CNN chair and CEO Chris Licht earlier this week and they “had a very robust exchange of views” about the town hall. Licht “welcomed” the exchange but stood by his decision to hold the event, according to Amanpour.

believes they did a public good. Many of CNN’s on-air talent have expressed the same sentiment, including primetime mainstay Anderson Cooper, who the day after the show insisted the town hall informed viewers of things they might not know about Trump — and even, essentially, said critics were being closed-minded.Amanpour didn’t mention Cooper by name, but in her remarks she seemed to respond directly to him. “The fact the American people voted 3 times against Trump and Trumpism — 2018, 2020, 2022 — also speaks volumes,” she said.

her lawsuit against Donald Trump, E. Jean Carroll and her attorney, Robbie Kaplan, appeared on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” to talk about that case. But of course Maddow brought up a related matter: CNN’s ill-advised, poorly received Trump town hall.At one point, Maddow asked Kaplan and Carroll a question that critics of the town hall have asked since it aired — could the disparaging comments Trump made about Carroll during the event get him sued again? According to Kaplan, “definitely.”You’ll recall that during the town hall, Trump repeatedly defamed Carroll.

Donald Trump’s town hall was the hot topic across Sunday political talk shows, including on ABC’s “This Week,” where former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said the audience of Trump supporters looked awfully similar to the ones he saw when he was running for president in 2016.“I don’t care how they introduced them. I know a lot of those people in that audience.

According to The Guardian, Trump saw the night as a success. And he wasn’t the only one, of course.

the pile of people who believe the the Donald Trump town hall CNN aired on Wednesday was a disastrous mistake. On Thursday’s episode of “All-In,” Hayes laid out in great detail why he thinks it was such a bad idea for CNN to give the disgraced ex-president such a prominent platform.

@acyn on Twitter).“About last night: the 70 minutes I spent on stage in New Hampshire with former President Donald Trump was a major inflection point in the Republican party’s search for its nominee, and potentially the starting line for America’s next presidential race,” Collins said.“It’s important to remember that he is, right now, the GOP front-runner, that he running, as noted, while being criminally indicted, found civilly liable and under investigation for everything from his handling of classified documents to his business empire.”Collins’ comments come as CNN remains at the center of a heavy backlash over the Trump town hall. That backlash is complex, but the unifying point is that it was an irresponsible mistake at every level.

For the third time today, a prominent figure at CNN attempted to reframe the network’s roundly-criticized town hall with former president Donald Trump on Wednesday night, an event moderated by Kaitlyn Collins.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper devoted a portion of his primetime program to address the backlash against the network for its town hall with Donald Trump, in which the Republican spewed lies and misinformation before a friendly, cheering audience.

Well, this was a predictably horrible idea.