CNN – Detractors Forget Key Aspects of Audience Response:  CNN, Milgram and Trump 

CNN – Detractors Forget Key Aspects of Audience Response:  CNN, Milgram and Trump 

By: Marion DS Dreyfus 

As to the wisdom of appearing on a TV channel known now far and wide for active news-reporting ‘errors’ that have been loudly and repeatedly fact-checked and belatedly corrected, we have no opinion, other than to say that as a leading contender for the upcoming presidential contest in 2024, in every poll, from every source, it makes sense for CNN to extend its fishing trawl to catch viewers who [like this author] never tune into that now-tainted near-defunct site, after innumerable misstatements and errors of consequence have turned away the wary.

But the recent, let-me-say, cool move of disfavored Atlanta, Georgia-based CNN to host an hour-long town hall in the first state of voting, New Hampshire, with former President Donald J. Trump was in many senses a coup.

The hysterics greeting the occasion after the fact of Kaitlan Collins interviewing feisty former 45 demonstrate anew for anyone young enough mentally to discern hecticity and choleric response showed that the risk Trump took was perhaps considerable.

He could, contrarily, expose himself and his piquant humor and well-turned arguments to a new segment of the polity. Worth a college try.

The audience of largely New Hampshire Republican or unaligned voters had on the whole voted at least once for Trump, so  Mr. Trump’s responses often elicited significant applause, laughter and audible approval.

So far, so expectable.

After the relentless hammering of the host interviewer, Kaitlan Collins on issues she all-but-demanded Mr. Trump agree with her [CNN’s] position on– such as Trump’s culpability on the ‘insurrection’ of 6 January, and his non-ordering of 10,000 DC troops to control the expected response to what millions felt was a ‘rigged election,’ and whether 45 would accede to the election results ‘this time’ because he has not yet conceded the loss of the second term  in the 2020 election results—she managed to hold it together as the much more focused and in-control businessman and impresario determined to finish his thoughts despite endless woody woodpecker chippings and nitpicky [and often wrong] interpolations throughout the hour.

After that exhausting edge of seat hour, wondering whether Donald J. would get to finish his thought, the CNN panel of  seven Trump=loathers chirped their singular and cumulative hate-sprach at the cameras, lest anyone forget this was, after all, CNN. The hate-trump and hate republican channel.

There was the sane corrective –huzzah for the bookers–of Floridian Congressman Byron Lowell Donalds, who delivered crisp rebuttals and correctives to all the unholy flotsam guttering about the panel with balm and healing rationality. He shut the flappy orifices of the naysayers by noting that for all the wild and overblown crit of the boffo perf of ex-[and future] prez, Trump had done the job far better than the recent WH occupant has managed, “and that’s a FACT.”

Which, of course, it was. And is.

Following these interludes, the in-studio audience was questioned acidulously as to their ‘honest reactions’ by veteran newsie, and author, Gary Tuchman.

Note that Tuchman salted every question, in a way no true journalist or MC should, with endless strings around the audience’s fingers that Trump had consistently expelled a packet of lies. No question to no audience member in Manchester, NH, was free of the obvious taint of the interviewer’s unvarying prompt that Mr. Trump had ‘lied’ on every issue he took up. No one dared call attention to Tuchman’s obnoxious poisoning the well. It would have been ‘rude’—and would have been silenced.

Some have decided that the dozen or so responses from the pro-Trump crowd were not unabashedly slavish or 100% behind the former Apprentice centerpiece.

May we remind the reader that back in 1961, Professor Stanley Milgram, at Yale, did a series of experiments on obedience. His remarkably premised experiments showed that people will often without much decision-making go along with the tester, even when they disagree with the methods, behavior or ethos of the experimenter.  Even when major stakes are involved.

At the time, Milgram found that testees were willing to administer a fatal voltage to test subjects, just because the person conducting the tests…told them to. Or gave the high-OK sign. The subjects thought the voltage was live, and could indeed electrify the persons in the booths.

I am of the opinion that Tuchman’s needless and unprofessional leaning on President Trump’s alleged untruthfulness influenced the audience answers. They shaded their generally positive responses to more accord with the crispy-nasty expectations of Tuchman.

Disclosure: This author has been in some later experiments of this type, in grad school and later, and we admit that it’s fairly difficult to not obey the perceived ‘boss’ of the experiment.

So while the CNN triumphalists could crow about the so-so responses of the local audience members, almost all of whom are avowed Trumpists for one or two elections, there is reason to suspect that the answers provided were not the true reflections of how the respondents actually feel. About Trump. Or about the issues covered.