Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago rally, April 4, 2023
On the evening following former President Donald Trump’s arraignment in New York City over hush money payments he arranged involving two women and a building doorman during his 2016 campaign, CNN provided the disgraced former president virtually unchecked airtime to spread a litany of lies to its audience.
CNN went live to Mar-a-Lago at 8:22 p.m. ET, followed by a straight feed for several minutes of Trump taking the stage to the cheers of the crowd, before he began his speech at 8:25 p.m. The network then carried Trump’s rambling speech directly for 23 minutes and 21 seconds of its 24 minute and 55 second total runtime, as he insulted the judge in the New York case as well as his family, continued pushing conspiracy theories claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and personally attacked the prosecutors investigating him or his businesses in multiple other cases, accusing Black prosecutors of being “racist” and “racist in reverse.”
As Trump meandered through his prepared remarks, claiming “the USA is a mess” and attacking President Joe Biden, the network finally cut away as the clock turned 8:49 p.m. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper pitched his first question after the speech to former Trump strategic communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin, asking her about Trump’s continued dominance of the Republican Party.
ANDERSON COOPER (CNN ANCHOR): I mean, this is a reprise of — we were waiting for him to talk about what happened today, he finally talked about it a little bit at the end there, and now we’re cutting out of it, but a reprise of pretty much every grievance. If you were a Republican who cares about the Republican Party and the future of the Republican Party, and you are watching this tonight, realizing this man now may be more powerful in the Republican Party than he was yesterday, or at least a little bit more safe in the Republican Party than it was yesterday. What’s going through your mind?
Ten minutes later, CNN anchor Jake Tapper offered up the network’s rationale for why it had provided so much free airtime to Trump’s conspiratorial stump speech.
“We felt that it was important after a day in which we were bringing you news of his arrest and arraignments that we allow the president — the former president — to give his view of the proceeding,” Tapper said. “And then obviously, it was somewhat incoherent and then began turning into a campaign event, at which point we cut away.”
Earlier in the hour, MSNBC demonstrated how a news outlet should handle candidate Trump’s live appearances, when anchor Rachel Maddow explained that Trump was expected to be “just giving his normal list of grievances” and repeating his other lies. “We don't consider that necessarily newsworthy, and there's a cost to us as a news organization of knowingly broadcasting untrue things,” Maddow said.
The host then explained what the network would do, in case Trump actually said something important: “So, our deal with you is that we will monitor these remarks. If he does say anything newsworthy, we will turn them around and report on that right away. But for now, just know that it's happening and we're not taking it.”
CNN provided free airtime for a belligerent address by a politician under multiple criminal investigations who already once incited an attack on the U.S. Capitol, and then patted itself on the back for cutting away eventually.
