New York CNN Business  — 

A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. You can sign up for free right here.

If you believe the best propaganda is the type that’s disguised as news, then Thursday night’s “town hall” was poor propaganda. Sean Hannity sat with the president in front of 50 supporters in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and they traded talking points back and forth for the first half of the hour. Then they went to the audience, and the first question was, “I appreciate so much what you have done for this country. And I know it’s been tough. What do you think is your greatest accomplishment, in your eyes?”

Numerous political reporters concluded that the biggest bit of news from the TV event was Trump’s failure to answer this Hannity softball: “What are your top priority items for a second term?”

“It’s a good question,” CNN’s Kaitlan Collins said, but Trump didn’t answer. She said “it’s difficult to think of another president being asked about their second term priorities and ultimately providing none, with just over four months to go before the election.

Three notes about the “town hall”

>> “The whole interview is unintelligible if you’re not steeped in right-wing media,” scholar Nicole Hemmer wrote…

>> Something Daniel Dale noticed: “May or may not mean anything, but Trump has been talking with interesting grammar about a Biden presidency – saying Tuesday that Biden will finish, rather than would finish, the border wall; saying today that Biden is ‘going to be your president.’”

>> NYT TV critic James Poniewozik shared this mini-review: “Events like this Hannity-Trump interview are complete propaganda. But I’m also not sure they do Trump any actual good other than reassure him that someone still loves him. It’s starting to feel like palliative care.”

A view from Fox

Did the “town hall” benefit Trump? Did it benefit Hannity? Well, Fox pointed to the fact that it was a first-of-its-kind audience town hall in the midst of a pandemic, with local residents wearing masks and respecting the social distancing guidelines. I think the view from Fox News HQ is that other networks would kill for live event programming like this.

But then I’d add, why not press the president about the pandemic? It was one hour of missed opportunities. Perhaps the newsiest quote was Trump saying “if we didn’t do testing, we’d have no cases,” a nonsensical line that Hannity didn’t challenge at all…

“We know what to do, and we are not doing it”

CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta said it best on “New Day” Thursday morning: “I cannot believe we’re in the position that we’re in in right now. We’re the greatest country on Earth. We should have been able to figure this out early. We should have been able to test. And now we’re still having arguments about whether or not we should put these Band-aids on the problem, such as masks. Effective Band-aids, but still, Band-aids on this problem. And we’re still not even sure that we want to do that. We’ve got a patient bleeding out in front of us, we know what to do, and we are not doing it.”

And he said it again Thursday night on CNN’s weekly coronavirus town hall: “We started off behind the curve, and we have never caught up…”

“How conservative media misinformation may have intensified pandemic’s severity”

Oliver Darcy writes: Over at WaPo, Christopher Ingraham took a look at three studies that have examined the role conservative media has played in spreading coronavirus misinformation. His conclusion? “Taken together, they paint a picture of a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others,” Ingraham concluded.

>> Irene Pasquetto, chief editor of the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review: “We are receiving an incredible number of studies and solid data showing that consuming far-right media and social media content was strongly associated with low concern about the virus at the onset of the pandemic…”

>> Watch my two-minute “CNN Tonight” story about right-wing rhetoric regarding face coverings…

The Facebook problem

Brian Lowry adds: In addition to the study about the dangers of watching Fox’s primetime hosts when it comes to coronavirus info, NBC’s Ben Collins had an important thread about disinformation within Facebook groups, and the difficulty of unraveling that – and penetrating disinformation bubbles in general. Money line: “Facebook created a directory of vulnerable people who can commiserate about the unseen powers keeping them down, and for grifters to isolate and take advantage of them…”

An “information tragedy”

On Thursday the CDC announced that the actual number of Covid-19 infections could be ten times higher than the 2.4 million known cases. Merrill Brown, founder and CEO of The News Project, pointed out that this message was delivered in a hour-long phone briefing with reporters. “News that 20 million people may have the virus merits a nationally televised White House briefing, not a call,” he tweeted, calling it “an information tragedy.”

I asked Brown to elaborate on what he meant, since that term is so evocative and seems so spot-on. He recently wrote this CNN Opinion piece about the federal leadership failure. He told me: “The British are ending their daily Downing Street press conference, which 80 percent of the British say informs them. The U.S. has no regular public briefings, no national spokesperson sharing government data or advice. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said there was ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ on April 29. The debate about masks is rich in misinformation with an entire world on Twitter around #AntiMaskers. According to Pew Research today, a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (61%) say that when it comes to coronavirus, ‘the worst is behind us.’”

He proved his point in a single paragraph. There is, indeed, an info tragedy layered on top of 2020’s medical tragedy…