The metaphor­i­cal beat­ing of breasts and rend­ing of gar­ments over CNNs’ “town hall” with Don­ald Trump is a salient les­son that pro­vid­ing live air time for proven liars and dis­sem­blers, not­ed for a pro­cliv­i­ty to con­trol the nar­ra­tive, is the equiv­a­lent of allow­ing them to write the script, and there’s enough of that done by flaks and syco­phants with­out adding to the pool.

TV and radio have the capa­bil­i­ty, and oblig­a­tion, to bleep out pro­fan­i­ty and racist language.
Lies, obfus­ca­tion and delib­er­ate dis­sem­bling should be sub­ject to the same tech­nol­o­gy and standards.
News out­lets edit their own reporters to main­tain coher­ence and stan­dards. (In the case of TV, often not near­ly enough, espe­cial­ly for gram­mat­i­cal errors.)
Warn­ing par­tic­i­pants in live news events like town halls in advance that the process will be applied to them in the form of cut­ting off the micro­phone, and then doing so if nec­es­sary, seems to me to fall into the same category.
The vibran­cy, inti­ma­cy and yes, enter­tain­ment val­ue of live TV is an intrin­sic fea­ture of West­ern cul­ture. That does not per force mean pro­vid­ing a mega­phone with a nation-wide ampli­fi­er to any politi­cian, nev­er mind one with the record and mind-set of Don­ald Trump, however.
Defend­ers of live events like “town halls” quite right­ly point to the respon­si­bil­i­ty and val­ue of giv­ing vot­ers the chance to inter­act with those who seek their support.
That alone ought to make it obvi­ous that the audi­ence needs to rep­re­sent a cross-sec­tion of the vot­ing pop­u­la­tion, not just those who hail and heed the star turn’s words unquestioningly.
Any oth­er con­fig­u­ra­tion doesn’t come close to meet­ing the Mer­ri­am-Web­ster dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tion of objec­tiv­i­ty:  “Express­ing or deal­ing with facts or con­di­tions as per­ceived with­out dis­tor­tion by per­son­al feel­ings, prej­u­dices, or inter­pre­ta­tion”.
Nor does it pay even nod­ding homage to the jour­nal­is­tic ide­al of impar­tial­i­ty, which sure­ly should exclude anoint­ing a “front-run­ner” on the basis of polls, a tool news out­lets above all oth­ers ought to have learned by now to view askance.

                   TOLERATING THE INTOLERABLE

Trump may have declaimed him­self a can­di­date for the pres­i­den­cy, but the old saw “a week is a long time in pol­i­tics” is also a tru­ism. Acclaim­ing him the like­ly win­ner in a field not even in the start­ing gate makes as much sense as putting mon­ey on next year’s Triple Crown win­ner before the track con­di­tions are known, nev­er mind the fit­ness of the run­ner in question.
It’s on a par with the appar­ent belief that bump­tious behav­iour on the part of office-seek­ers must be tol­er­at­ed in order for us to under­stand and assess their motives, char­ac­ter and fit­ness for office.
In report­ing on those who nei­ther wel­come nor will enter­tain ques­tions that do not con­form to their plea­sure and plat­form, news organ­i­sa­tions, espe­cial­ly those pre­sent­ing them to the pub­lic in a live forum, need to take heed of what the philoso­pher and social com­men­ta­tor Karl Pop­per called “the para­dox of tolerance”.
In his 1945  work, “The Open Soci­ety and Its Ene­mies”,  Pop­per wrote: “If we extend unlim­it­ed tol­er­ance even to those who are intol­er­ant, if we are not pre­pared to defend a tol­er­ant soci­ety against the onslaught of the intol­er­ant, then the tol­er­ant will be destroyed, and tol­er­ance with them…We should there­fore claim, in the name of tol­er­ance, the right not to tol­er­ate the intolerant.”

                        APPLYING POWER TO POWER

TV has an unpar­al­leled capac­i­ty to take peo­ple places they’ve nev­er been and show them things they may nev­er have seen, but  need to, whether they like them or not.
The trick, and respon­si­bil­i­ty of doing TV news is dis­cern­ing how to do so and then stop just before reach­ing the point at which view­ers are so offend­ed or upset by it, they change the channel.
Video shot with a sen­si­tive, judi­cious and tech­ni­cal­ly pro­fi­cient eye can impart as much in fif­teen sec­onds, as the best news­pa­per writ­ers I know and have worked with  are able do in as many paragraphs.
When it comes to main­tain­ing stan­dards and pro­vid­ing the means for vot­ers to make informed deci­sions, it is the respon­si­bil­i­ty of jour­nal­ism, espe­cial­ly the live ver­sion,  to cleave to the poet Robert Browning’s won­der­ful phrase; “Ah but man’s reach should exceed his  grasp or what’s a heav­en for.”
Fail­ing that, I sug­gest fol­low­ing the “trig­ger warn­ings” so beloved by TV net­works with a pen­chant for hav­ing some­one else make the deci­sion, along the lines of:
“The fol­low­ing may include devi­a­tions from the sub­ject, self-serv­ing rant­i­ng, obfus­ca­tion, out­right lies and insults to nor­mal lev­els of intel­li­gence. View­er dis­cre­tion is advised”.
Alter­na­tive­ly, they could just end the next “town hall” by not­ing that: “The pre­ced­ing was an unpaid polit­i­cal advertisement.”

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