CNN Stopped Airing Trump’s Campaign Speech After The Crowd Started Chanting ‘CNN Sucks’


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PENSACOLA, FL - SEPTEMBER 09: Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during his rally at the Pensacola Bay Center on September 9, 2016 in Pensacola, Florida. Polls show that Trump and Clinton are tied in Florida. (Photo by Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images)

Hours after repeating his belief that DNA evidence has not exonerated the Central Park Five, the president of the United States formally launched his 2020 presidential re-election campaign. It was via a rally, of course, set in Orlando, Florida. You could have watched the whole thing on Fox News, of course. MSNBC didn’t air it. Nor did CNN, at least after the first five minutes or so.

According to The Daily Beast, the news network decided to pull the plug on Donald Trump’s speech around the second time, in five minutes, he got around to ginning up his fanbase over the “fake news media.” Complaining, once more, about how they cover things a sitting president does, Trump whipped them into a fury, getting them do the chants they so love. Eventually chants of “fake news” turned into “CNN sucks,” at which point the channel thought it wise to ditch it for anything else.

Here’s around the moment CNN peaced out.

Had CNN stuck with the rally, what they would have broadcast was Trump once again drawing the crowd he likes to whip up to the reporters standing towards the back. “That is a lot of fake news back there,” he said after the chant had died down. The president has repeatedly encouraged violence against journalists, even after a man shot up Maryland’s Capital Gazette, and even after one of his fans mailed pipe bombs to many people on his enemy’s list, including to the building that houses CNN.

The move was praised internally.

https://twitter.com/joshscampbell/status/1141139199350861825

And it was at least noted externally.

Others weren’t happy CNN decided to cover it at all, choosing to instead praise MSNBC.

Elsewhere during his rally, Trump went through the usual complaints, with particular ire for Hillary Clinton, who ran against him in 2016 and who is not running now, even bringing up those dreaded e-mails.

https://twitter.com/poniewozik/status/1141145514781659137

If you’d like to see coverage of the speech without having to watch all of it, Vox journalist Aaron Rupar painstakingly highlighted the highlights in real time, starting here.

(Via The Daily Beast)