Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime, 14, was killed in the Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School shooting on Feb. 14, asks Sen. Marco Rubio a question during a CNN "Stand Up" town hall meeting on Wednesday. | Michael Laughlin/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP CNN draws raves for emotional town hall After years of struggling with a canned format, the town hall came alive in Florida on Wednesday night.

CNN’s town-hall format — often maligned for feeling like canned or manufactured for TV — came alive Wednesday night as parents and survivors of last week’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, produced two hours of riveting, emotional television that may actually have moved the nation’s dialogue on guns.

It seemed to mark a breakthrough for the network, which has struggled to present itself an independent arbiter of moments of national crisis, while competitors Fox and MSNBC achieved greater ratings growth by pushing more hours of opinion-host programming.


“I had never been able to get over the suffused phoniness of the ‘town hall’ format. But last night on @CNN proved me wrong. Extraordinary event,” tweeted New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen.

The network did 23 town halls in 2017, according to its own count, and another two so far in 2018, on topics ranging from health care to tax reform. Many have featured politicians like Nancy Pelosi (three times last year) or Paul Ryan (twice) engaging with audience members, in exchanges that could feel oddly stage managed or pat. Other times, politicians like Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz debated each other. Almost always, days in advance, there is a countdown clock lodged in the bottom corner of CNN’s screen letting you know how many hours, minutes and seconds away the town hall is from airing.

But any artifice went out the window last night, as students and parents, raw with emotion, confronted Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch. As the two-hour program progressed, news organizations reported on the news being made—Rubio said he supports raising the age limit for purchasing AR-15-style rifles—and social media lit up with commentary.

Morning Media Your guide to the media circus — weekday mornings, in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Often, politicians’ talking points overwhelm the town halls, said Frank Sesno, the director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University and a former longtime CNN reporter and anchor. But he said the emotion and circumstances of last night’s event made it unique. Particularly affecting was when student Cameron Kasky challenged Rubio over whether he would continue to accept money from the NRA.

“I really do think that the immediacy and the humanity that was on display because of the presence of people who themselves suffered loss put it in a very personal and profound place,” Sesno said. “Having part of that conversation politicians who typically live on the soundbite and the NRA, which typically ducks the conversation, made this a collision of emotion and loss and urgency and humanity which you just seldom see.”

“I’ve watched a million of these town halls, I’ve watched them, I’ve hosted them, you almost never have these sort of things,” he continued, noting that the ones he’s hosted have not been on CNN. “When Bernie Sanders is there with Ted Cruz, it’s dueling soundbites.”

Sesno said that managing and directing so much emotion, as CNN host Jake Tapper had to do, can be a real challenge. The key, he said, was the network’s decision to let events unfold organically over two hours, and give students and parents space to make their points.

“They let it breathe,” he said. “They were in the right place in the right time. They had an incredible group of people. They let it breathe and they let it be genuine. That’s the hardest thing for cable television.”

The other key, Sesno said, was the contrast of the students and parents’ authenticity and emotion with the more canned presentation of the politicians. More than anything, that seemed to resonate on Twitter.

“Watching a teenager fundamentally challenge Rubio’s talking points feels like watching a generation call B.S. on a whole form of politics,” the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos tweeted. “For years, Rubio’s weakness has always been inauthenticity, but no journalist (including this one) has evoked it as vividly.”

Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti put it even more succinctly: “I want to watch teenagers school politicians every night of the week.”

