The Media Research Center was perhaps a little too eager to trash CNN’s town hall on the government shutdown. Jorge Bonilla ranted in an Oct. 16 post:
CNN’s much-hyped Shutdown America town hall was, by and large, little more than an extended infomercial for socialism in America, with Kaitlan Collins acting mostly as a facilitator. Little was achieved by this exercise except to showcase the maximalist demands of guests Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders in exchange for an end to the ongoing government shutdown.
The question mix was pretty interesting: of the 14 audience questions we counted, five were considered to have come from a right-leaning perspective, six were neutral, and only three were from the left.
The first question is on hardship assistance for furloughed government employees.
[…]A Democrat student from George Washington University asks why the GOP is so much more effective on social media. Bernie claims the GOP controls the platforms, AOC goes off into a weird rant about masculinity.
[…]One imagines that this town hall is similar to the socialism events that Bernie and AOC do throughout the country. As a nation continues to face down the barrel of a shutdown, the people are needing leadership. Instead, and with a big assist from CNN, it is our sense that the people got the former.
Of course Bonilla would think that — after all, it’s his job to take the non-liberal viewpoint (not that he discloses this, of course).
Several hours later, Bill D’Agostino whined further about the CNN town hall:
Back in 2023, CNN’s Kaitlin Collins spent the entirety of a televised town hall contradicting and interrupting her guest, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. By contrast, when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders joined Collins for a town hall on Wednesday night (October 15), she repeatedly permitted her guests to launch into talking point-laden stump speeches with no pushback.
[…]MRC analysts examined the entirety of both CNN town halls hosted by Collins: one featuring Trump on May 10, 2023, and one featuring Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders on October 15, 2025. In 2023, Collins interrupted Trump 113 times — 12.5 times more than she interrupted either liberal guest. The combined speaking time of both Democrat guests in 2025 totaled exactly 60 minutes — almost 50 percent more than Trump’s 41 minutes two years earlier.
Across Trump’s 41 minutes, the 113 interruptions average out to 2.75 interruptions per minute, or one every 22 seconds. For the Democrats, Collins’s nine interjections during their full hour of speaking time means they were interrupted only 0.15 times per minute, or once every 6.6 minutes.
The same day, meanwhile, Curtis Houck found a town hall that was much more palatable to his partisan tastes:
While Wednesday night’s CNN town hall with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was 92 minutes of what our Jorge Bonilla dubbed “an extended infomercial for socialism in America,” NewsNation held a town hall a few miles away at the Kennedy Center that not only ran longer (at 141 minutes), but featured a robust debate with a parade of guests spanning both age and the political spectrum.
Imagine that. A respectful but rigorous exchange of ideas featuring those left, right, and center about what ails the country and the need to both think critically and engage outside our partisan bubbles and media ecosystems. At its most fundamental core, that is what journalism should be.
The MRC just loves NewsNation’s approach to news, ignoring its clear right-wing stance.
Houck then rolled out what passes for star power — sports guy Stephen A. Smith and disgraced ex-Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly — to “share what means the most to each of them about where the country finds itself.” We don’t recall anyone asking what falafel dude what he has to say about anything. He went on to tout wayward Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, who “mostly focused on Fetterman remaining in the Democrat Party [sic] despite feeling isolated on issues such as the government shutdown and supporting Israel.” This was followed by border czar Tom Homan, who “after some questions about the anonymous and dubious claims in MSNBC he accepted bribes, Cuomo, Smith, and an audience member each grilled him on the administration’s deportation efforts.” Houck declared this to be “refreshing civil discourse” as opposed to say, partisan talking points.
This was followed by a block featuring ” MeidasTouch commentator Adam Mockler and Turning Point USA’s Andrew Kolvet, one of the late Charlie Kirk’s closest friends,” in which “Mockler tried to derail the conversation by arguing the left has little to answer for, but it’s the right with a political violence problem,” to which he added: “To his credit, Cuomo put the train back on the tracks.” Houck went on to reference “the dumb and racist Young Republican group chats,” though he wouldn’t denounce the racism any further than that.
Houck closed by noting that Cuomo “reiterated his opening remarks about NewsNation and, more broadly, ‘conversation’ being ‘the cure’ to our country’s divisions.” Houck didn’t explain how such a slanted “conversation” like this is supposed to help.
Tim Graham rehashed D’Agostino’s hyperbolic town hall claims in his Oct. 17 podcast, which featured “Fox News contributor Joe Concha,” who presumably had nothing good to say about the CNN town hall and only good things to say about the NewsNation town hall. Graham made a point of adding: “AOC has never submitted for an interview with Fox News Channel — unlike the socialist New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who refused to give an answer when Martha McCallum asked him if Hamas should put down their arms and accept peace.” Graham didn’t ask why, exactly, that is the case, given Fox News’ well-documented partisan history.