Did CNN cut the Trump town hall short — by 20 minutes?

I didn't know how long the show was supposed to be, but when it ran over the hour, I figured it would go 90 minutes, and then it ended at 10 minutes after the hour? Was that the plan?

I see Newsweek has a piece this morning titled "CNN Cutting Donald Trump Town Hall Short by 20 Minutes Raises Questions." It begins:

Questions have been raised as to why CNN appeared to cut a town hall broadcast with Donald Trump on Wednesday evening short by as much as 20 minutes....

If you go deep enough into that article, you'll see:

A CNN spokesperson told Newsweek it had gone on record "days ago" that the town hall would last "roughly an hour" with "a little room to bleed over." 

I believe that, because, seen live, the ending didn't look abrupt, Trump didn't act surprised or outraged, and the moderator, Kaitlan Collins, didn't seem to be acting ungracious or punitive. She had been prodding him about his lies/"lies" throughout, and to give up before the planned end time would seem as though her pushback had been inadequate, which is not something CNN would want to concede. Of course, Trump bulled ever onward. That was predicted and prepared for. Nothing went wrong, and it would have been wrong to pull the plug early. 

Donald Trump calls a woman "sweetie" and — accepting her kiss — gives a return air kiss.

Because of the content of the previous post,  I'm calling attention to what happens at the end of this clip:



The details of what's going on there are described, by Dylan Byers at CNN, in "Behind Trump's 'job interview' with Alicia Watkins."

Identifying herself as a 9/11 survivor and Afghanistan/Iraq war veteran, [Alicia] Watkins asked Trump if his new hotel in Washington would include a veterans employment program. Trump said it would, and asked her to come to the podium for a job interview.

"What are you looking for? What kind of a position? Come up here, you look so smart and good," Trump said. "Do you mind if I do a job interview right now?"

Oh! He commented on her looks: You look so smart and good.

Watkins, who came to the stage wearing a media credential, told Trump that she did "design," "briefs" and "all kinds of decorations." Trump then passed her along to one of his aides, and told the crowd: "If we can make a good deal on a salary she's probably going to have a job."...

Trump himself was asked about his exchange with Watkins after Monday's press conference.... "I felt good about her," Trump responded "I looked at and I have a gut instinct. We're allowed to have that. I looked at her. She asked a positive question.... She seemed like a good person to me."

I wonder if the whole thing wasn't planned and staged. In this C-SPAN clip of her talking to reporters afterwards, at 3:58 — for what it's worth — she says it wasn't planned.

"Nate Silver fared terribly in Thursday's UK election... The fault, Silver claimed, was with the polling."

Don't blame Silver, says Silver. He only processes the data he gets from polls done by other people.

"The World May Have A Polling Problem," Silver asserted. "In fact, it’s become harder to find an election in which the polls did all that well."... "[T]here are lots of reasons to worry about the state of the polling industry," Silver concluded, citing a range of factors. "There may be more difficult times ahead for the polling industry."

Well, that's awfully bland... from Dylan Byers at Politico, who was only processing the raw material Silver gave him. Can I blame Silver? For anything, ever? He cited "a range of factors." Were they too dull and meaningless to be worth more than the repetition of the conclusion that polls just aren't that good?

ADDED: The NYT surveys some analysis of what went wrong with the polls:

“It could be simply that people lied to the pollsters, that they were shy or that they genuinely had a change of heart on polling day,” [said Alberto Nardelli, writing in The Guardian], “Or there could be more complicated underlying challenges within the polling industry, due, for example, to the fact that a diminishing number of people use landlines or that Internet polls are ultimately based on a self-selected sample.”...

“What seems to have gone wrong is that people have said one thing and they did something else in the ballot box,” [said Peter Kellner, the president of YouGov, a leading survey firm]. “We are not as far out as we were in 1992, not that that is a great commendation.”...

Rem Korteweg, a senior research fellow at the Center for European Reform in London, said... “People say who they are voting for with their heart and then vote with their wallets,”...

To tweak Korteweg's point: People say what they think will make other people like them, but they do what they think is in their interest. Re-tweak: People do what is in their interest, which is to say what they believe is socially desirable, and that won't square up with what they do when no one's looking. If this is the problem, it's a problem that will get worse as it becomes more widely believed that liberalism makes you look good. Korteweg is contributing to the contagion of this belief by saying that in their hearts people are liberal, nudging us all to say I'm a liberal, so I'll seem to be a person with a heart.



(Detail about that video here.)

"Dana Milbank's Heritage disaster."

Dylan Byers explains.

"Jill Abramson lost her job, but so far she's winning the press relations war."

"In the 24 hours since she was fired from The New York Times, her downfall has become a flashpoint for a national conversation about gender and inequality that is all but eclipsing what sources cite as the reasons for her termination."

Why didn't the Times get out in front with its first-ever! black executive editor story?

Far from celebrating Baquet, the Times leadership instead finds itself scrambling to deflect charges of sexism surrounding the termination of its first-ever female executive editor.

Race can trump gender. "Trump" is a card-game word, and we're talking about race and gender cards. But in a card game, you have to play the card to win. And in the race-and-gender card game, you lose if you look like you are playing. In this race-and-gender game, it's not the NYT or Jill Abramson who is out there playing the cards. Others are doing the commentary, and there are so many writers — especially female journalists — who are ready to play, as I noted a couple posts down, quoting "The fury of women journalists who identify with Abramson stems from what we know: that excellent performances are not enough."

Commenter MayBee said "The fury of women journalists" sounded like one of those old "terms of venery" like "a murder of crows" and "a crash of rhinos."

So beware. Don't assume race beats sex. Obama beat Hillary, but it's a little more complicated than a generic approval of first black over first female. There's an elaborate political/PR game to be played, and the winners and losers are determined subjectively within human minds, those minds are affected by what is written, and, for things to be written, there must be writers.

And — look out!!! — there's a fury of females.

Ta-Nehisi Coates reacts to the reaction to his calling Melissa Harris-Perry "America's foremost public intellectual."

"I made this claim because of Harris-Perry's background," he says, reciting achievements from her resume. Somebody has to be America's foremost public intellectual, right? Actually, that's not right, and any time you create a superlative, you're inviting dispute. Coates humorously restates his designation as the "TNC Public Intellectual Prize," which retracts the invitation. In TNC's opinion, MHP is America's foremost public intellectual. Okay, then... never mind. She's a public intellectual — aren't we all?

And we're all entitled to have our personal favorites, not that I can think of mine, and if I could, I wouldn't use the expression "America's foremost public intellectual." I'd say "my favorite public intellectual." And doesn't that really show Coates's sleight of hand? Both "America's" and "foremost" imply that this isn't a matter of his personal preference or even his opinion of who is the best, but an observation of prominence in America. "Foremost" doesn't mean best. It means first in rank, and to speak in terms of what is "foremost" is to claim that there is a rank. Why do that?

"Kurtz had a string of high-profile mistakes on his record and that had become a source of embarrassment for The Daily Beast."

And "he commanded a hefty paycheck, despite turning out fewer scoops than in the past," write  Dylan Byers and Katie Glueck, citing anonymous sources at the Daily Beast and CNN.

“People here have been groaning about Howie for years,” a source at CNN said. “He’s like the Dick Morris of media critics — just shoddy and out of the game.”...

“It became clear to folks here that Howie had a lot of other commitments, and that that wasn’t working,” a Daily Beast source said....

Despite having his own show on CNN, Kurtz has dedicated much of his recent time to a new venture: a website called “The Daily Download,” where he regularly appears in video segments with the site’s founder and editor Lauren Ashburn. That preoccupation seems to have taken a toll on Kurtz’s attention span and focus....

”What would I go to this site for? As another place Howard Kurtz does his able thing on the week’s media news? Okay, but why does he need that? And why do we? He’s got the Daily Beast and CNN: plenty of platform,” Jay Rosen, the New York University journalism professor, wrote in an email to POLITICO. “Daily Download resists understanding.”

"Resists understanding" is a nice phrase.

"NBC's David Gregory, the subject of a now-popular police investigation..."

Politico's Dylan Byers seems to think the deliberate flouting of D.C. gun laws — committing a crime, knowingly, right there on network TV — is some kind of absurd winger obsession.