To put it mildly: these are bullshit straw men arguments and not reflective of reality.
First, you present a false choice. The choice is not fail to cover Trump at all or give him a klan rally as they chose to do. You can cover him as he is - as an existential threat to democracy who tried to overthrow the government in an attempted auto coup and has promised to purge the government if elected again. These are all things known before CNN’s Trump rally. If any candidate demands that the only way for them to appear on your network is to give them a softball game with naked cheerleaders and no news of their recent guilty verdicts allowed, you say no. That’s integrity.
You say that CNN had ratings problems and had perceived integrity problems so they decided in your own words to:
That’s antithetical to actual integrity and guess what? it lost them their ratings too. Far from being in the toilet before and raised by Trump’s appearance, CNN’s numbers are in free fall since the town hall. The link is an earlier post.
So basically everything you guys said is wrong. I won’t cover the rest of the wrongness because that would deserve its own thread, but none of what you said is true. Almost every journalist outside of CNN and a good number within it criticized the integrity of the decision making around the town hall - you yourself admitted they tried to trade integrity for ratings though you tried to phrase it differently. In the end they lost both.
I think the strawman would be equating Trump with the KKK, that’s totally hyperbolic. I don’t think Trump is remotely close to where he should be with inclusivity and too many times his narcissism has impeded him from adequately condemning hate groups that support him- that fact alone should disqualify him in public opinion. But he actually did explicitly disavow David Duke. The only person I’m aware of Donald Trump ever may have tried to have lynched was Mike Pence. (You have to admit, that was clever
)
And whether we like it or not, Donald Trump is the leading R candidate with near identical polling to Biden. To this point he has not been convicted of any crimes involving the election- though that very well may change nor is he (yet) ineligible to run for office. If CNN didn’t host the town hall, you don’t think he has other ways of having a platform. It’s in the public interest whether you like it or not. It’s not like he’s some nobody they are platforming.
So if Trump god forbid is re-elected, I guess the media should never hold and interview with him, right? Or maybe you let him talk and challenge the ideas in real time and afterwords- which is exactly what CNN did.
I’m not sure your point re: integrity. Just because an organization lacks integrity doesn’t mean it’s always the case- though one could argue the town hall should have had a representative spectrum of voters rather than likely giving Trump whatever he wanted just to have him on.
You also have to remember the context of this too. This is right after Fox booted Tucker Carlson. Trump is also feuding with Fox right now because Murdoch is backing DeSantis. CNN likely wanted to try to pick up viewers- keep in mind a lot of Fox viewers are not hardcore republicans.
And initially they were successful- they had over 3m viewers- 3x their normal view ship these days in that time slot.
Just because ultimately airing Trump lead to backlash and potentially caused a drop in viewership doesn’t mean my speculation is wrong. Decisions are made all the time without properly predicting the degree of backlash. Many examples of that these days.
If Trump was on Fox instead, there possibly would have been very little pushback, at least in real time by Fox. Follow up analysis by other media might never be watched. Wouldn’t you rather have him on CNN who will actually hold him to account, even if his fans are cheering him on in the background.