CNN

So, what has happened to CNN, that it would give Trump that "town hall" opportunity, hosted by a woman who once worked for Tucker Carlson at The Daily Caller? Can it be a coincidence that CNN has recently changed hands and now has a billionaire conservative Trump donor on its board? Here's a bit of an article at Vox from last year.

Why billionaire John Malone’s shadow looms over CNN

CNN is in flux. It has a new owner, and a new boss, who promises to remake the news channel and has told employees to be prepared for “a time of change.” ....

But the bigger question floating over one of the world’s largest and most important news organizations is why it’s changing. Is it because the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, its new owner, wants an overhaul? Or is it at the behest of a conservative billionaire investor in the company who sits on its board?

That billionaire is John Malone .... Malone has repeatedly wished, in public, for CNN to remake itself. And his prescription happens to sync with the new CNN agenda: a plan to steer the channel away from what Malone and others call a liberal bias they say muddles opinion and news. And to shift it toward a supposedly centrist, just-the-facts bent ....

“I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing,” he said. Then he suggested a model: “Fox News, in my opinion, has followed an interesting trajectory of trying to have ‘news’ news, I mean some actual journalism, embedded in a program schedule of all opinions.” ...

Right, Fox News, the very epitome of "news' news".

And this from Justia ...

CNN Turns Propaganda Organ. We Don’t Have to Put Up With It.

[...] Fox propaganda has creeped into the center of America’s cable television.

It’s one thing for Trump to normalize extremism by hosting neo-Nazi speakers on the podium at his Miami event this weekend. Or even for a Fox host to peddle white supremacy.

It’s quite another for CNN, a center-to-center-left channel, to legitimize the man who sought to overturn the 2020 election and has been adjudged a sexual abuser. The medium is the message, and CNN has far more power than Fox to convey to a mainstream audience the message, “Trump is normal.”

The very first lesson in On Tyranny, Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s seminal handbook on how to fight creeping totalitarianism, is that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” Snyder warns that citizens and institutions giving power freely to strongmen grants them the social approval they need to consolidate power and dominate.

CNN voluntarily gave Trump its power ....