Media Matters' Angelo Carusone discusses CNN’s ill-fated town hall on Texas Public Radio
Carusone: “We should keep in mind that these types of town halls were literally invented by Roger Ailes when he was Richard Nixon's media advisor"
Published
Media Matters' Angelo Carusone discusses CNN’s ill-fated town hall on Texas Public Radio
Citation From the May 11, 2023, edition of Texas Public Radio's The Source
DAVID MARTIN DAVIES (HOST): Angelo, what do you think about CNN making the decision to do that town hall in that manner?
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): I mean, I think it's a huge mistake, obviously. My bigger concern to sort of tie into some of the feedback, especially around the audience engagement, is that I found worse was that -- We should keep in mind that these types of town halls were literally invented by Roger Ailes when he was Richard Nixon's media advisor. I mean, they were designed to be a manipulative tool, to essentially serve campaign purposes. So when CNN agreed not just to a town hall format but to a format in which they would have specifically ideologically-aligned audience members, that was a big concern.
What's worse is that as a condition of Trump doing the event, they allowed the campaign to choose, to seat 15 people of their choosing within the audience. And that has an incredibly distorting effect because you're taking an already sympathetic audience or aligned audience, and then you put in functionally operatives into the audience that clap, that know when to clap or when to jeer or when to cheer or when to boo. What it does is it further adds to the manipulative effect. I think, to me, that's my biggest concern. Not just that they did it, how they did it, but some of the nuts and bolts of the actual production itself are really, really disturbing and insidious when you start to unpack it.