CNN has faced intense scrutiny after former President Donald Trump featured on a town hall during which he repeated falsehoods about the 2020 election, among other topics, on live TV.
Throughout the broadcast, Trump received combinations of laughter and applause from the audience, which celebrated him calling CNN host Kaitlan Collins a "nasty person" and chuckled as he made remarks about E. Jean Carroll. On Tuesday, a Manhattan jury of nine men and three women in a civil case found the former president liable for sexually abusing and defaming her.
In the aftermath, a viral claim spread on Twitter that from now on, CNN would no longer have live audiences as part of its town hall broadcasts.
The Claim
A tweet by professional gamer @akafacehots, posted on May 11, 2023, viewed 1.5 million times, said: "CNN announces there will be no more live audiences at town halls.
"Trump broke CNN. 😂😂"
The Facts
Trump's performance at the town hall has received something of a mixed reception. While supporters rallied, some experts suggested Trump's comments could cause him additional legal woes to those he has already.
Legal analyst and MSNBC contributor Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor and frequent Trump critic, said during a podcast that the former president had made "directly incriminating" statements.
During one moment in the broadcast, Collins asked Trump if he had shown the classified documents that he kept after his presidency "to anyone."
Trump responded by saying "not really" and "not that I can think of," while wrongly claiming that he had "the absolute right to do whatever I want with them."
"I predict those incriminating statements will be introduced into evidence at the future trial of the United States of America versus Donald Trump," Kirschner said.
Despite this, his fans in the audience cheered, making enough noise to be heard clearly throughout the program.
However, the claim that Trump's appearance led to a ban on all future live audiences is untrue. CNN confirmed to Newsweek on Friday that it had made no such announcement.
Newsweek did not find any other repetitions of the claim, which might have been intended as satire.
In any case, as confirmed by the network, it has not said it would remove live audiences from the show.
Although the audience could be heard during the broadcast, the verdict at a debrief afterward was more muted. Eight members—the majority of them Trump supporters—told CNN after the show that their opinion of him was unchanged.
Asked to give a show of hands, none said they thought Trump looked better or worse after the town hall. A clip of the moment was shared on Twitter, where it quickly went viral, amassing more than 250,000 views in a matter of hours.
The Ruling
False.
Whatever the intention of the original tweet, it is not true, as confirmed by a CNN to Newsweek. The network said it had not announced the removal of audiences from future town halls.
FACT CHECK BY Newsweek's Fact Check team
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
