Democrats think the potential GOP 2024 frontrunner is too dangerous to platform — even on CNN, with a CNN host moderating his town hall. It’s almost as if they haven’t learned anything from 2016.
Consider some of the reactions from liberals to former President Donald Trump’s CNN town hall on Wednesday night:
CNN thinks giving Trump a platform to promote lies is “objectivity” 🫠
— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) May 11, 2023
CNN should be ashamed of themselves.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 11, 2023
They have lost total control of this “town hall” to again be manipulated into platforming election disinformation, defenses of Jan 6th, and a public attack on a sexual abuse victim.
The audience is cheering him on and laughing at the host.
Why did CNN host a Trump rally?
— Daniel Goldman (@danielsgoldman) May 11, 2023
We can't do anything about CNN or other media outlets giving the GOP frontrunner airtime.
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) May 11, 2023
We can do something about making sure he doesn't win again.
Focus on the choice. Act accordingly.
What you might not realize from these apoplectic tweets is that CNN was not airing a Trump stump speech, but rather a town hall in which Trump went back and forth with moderator Kaitlan Collins.
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Yes, due to many factors that were within CNN’s control, Trump came off looking good to his own supporters. But there’s no logic to the argument that CNN was merely giving Trump a platform to share his views with no chance for pushback. Collins pushed back quite a bit. So why are Democrats now seemingly calling for censorship?
They’re essentially arguing that a major media organization should not give a platform to a major political figure “because he said things I don’t like.” No matter that many major media organizations, including CNN itself, are already busy publishing their fact-checks of the event.
So what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and others really mean when they criticize CNN is that they don’t trust the American public to make their own decisions. And, perhaps more importantly, they don’t like having to face the fact that Trump still has many fans.
“The audience is cheering him on and laughing at the host,” Ocasio-Cortez grumbled in her tweet, after complaining that CNN “lost control” of the town hall.
You don’t have to agree with anything Trump said, including his characterizations of Jan. 6 and E. Jean Carroll, who just won her defamation case against the former president, to support CNN’s right to give him a platform.
To his credit, CNN CEO Chris Licht apparently said in an editorial call on Thursday, “While we all may have been uncomfortable hearing people clapping, that was also an important part of the story,” adding that the Republican audience represents “a large swath of America.”
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Maybe this town hall was nothing but clickbait for CNN, and it likely could have been handled better. That still doesn’t mean that platforming the former president is unilaterally bad, which seems to be what some Democratic activists are suggesting.
Democrats may say they don’t want a repeat of 2016, or, God forbid, 2020, but if they continue to call for censorship against Trump, and by proxy of his supporters, it will become that much more likely that we face another four years of President Donald Trump.