Ben Taylor @VoxDei@qoto.org

@freemo OK, well, maybe it's the format I have a problem with then. We don't really do that in the UK, we have TV debates (some), we have one-on-one interviews, but we don't really have a here-say-what-you-want-for-an-hour thing. We have party political broadcasts, but they're clearly labelled as such and don't have a moderator, it's just a canned broadcast that the party prepares but paid for by the state (for parties that have seats in Parliament already).

If a candidate wants to speak somewhere then of course they can do so, but they aren't generally carried live for an hour, you just get a couple of highlights on the news. And the TV channel would probably be obliged to present the opposing view or be subject to sanction by the regulator - there is an obligation for broadcasts to be politically balanced here that doesn't exist in the US.

I guess this comes back to the original point then? If all it was supposed to be was a Trump rally (and I'm not really seeing the difference between your description of a "town hall" and a political rally? Other than maybe the audience can ask more questions?), then CNN is responsible for their own choice to carry it. People who don't like Trump rallies are likely to be turned off by that being carried uncritically? I accept the point about if it's for the Republican primary then a Republican audience might be normal, but at the same time you're broadcasting it to everyone, Republican or not. Why is there an obligation on CNN or any network to carry that? Wait for the actual presidential race and then don't softball him (or any candidate)?

@freemo I'm not limiting my opinion to Trump! If you want to be elected to the highest offices you need to face the hardest questions, Biden absolutely needs to be challenged as well!

@realcaseyrollins @freemo I'm... not really sure I can bring myself to listen to an hour of Trump ranting. I don't even get a vote. Life's too short, and all that. I accept this limits the value of my opinion on the thing that I don't want to listen to. 🙂

@freemo As I understand it CNN selected the audience to be New Hampshire registered Republican voters and non-aligned voters planning to vote in the Republican primary. So it's not that the democrats didn't bother coming, they weren't invited. Probably to avoid a punch-up in the audience.

Maybe I don't understand the town-hall format. But if you know the candidate is going to say things that are not merely untrue in your opinion but have been found to be untrue in court multiple times, I don't think it's right to let them do that again without challenge, whatever the format.

@realcaseyrollins @freemo Well, fair enough, like I say I haven't seen it (I don't even live in the States). I read a summary in the Guardian, and nobody's going to call them neutral on Trump. Their claim was that Collins lost control and was steamrollered by Trump, and even if she tried she was unable to do anything. If that's untrue then what I said may not apply, though remains true in general terms. 🙂

@freemo While I agree that Trump is as deserving of a platform as any other political candidate (and I haven't watched the CNN thing, only read a summary, so I could be wrong), from what I hear the issue is less that Trump had a platform and more that he was given a free ride. From the sound of things:

1. Trump was allowed to tell lie after lie after lie and was not called out on any of them. CNN wasn't able to even begin to either challenge his lies or provide fact checking to the viewers. It was entirely predictable and predicted that he would do this, it's not like it was a surprise to them, they should have been ready.

2. The audience was entirely sympathetic to him. There was nobody to ask him hard questions and they were all ready to lap up his lies.

Trump is as deserving of a platform as any significant candidate for major political office. But in giving him (or any other candidate) that platform it is incumbent on the organisation doing it to challenge the candidate, to not simply permit them to say whatever they want whether it's true or not and to make sure that they are asked the questions that they don't want to answer.

A media organisation that does not do these things is not a news or current affairs outlet, it is a propaganda outfit. I wouldn't watch Fox or OAN to get my news about Trump and American politics, and if this is how CNN behaves towards him now I wouldn't watch them either.

@drandrewv2 Yeah, but if they talked about what's actually happening today (both specifically today with the strikes and generally today as in "the state of the country" the government might get mad at them, so they need to go back to what was happening when Labour was in power. ;-)

@volcan01010 I am a software developer. I left the Met Office last year for exactly this reason - a 50% salary increase. I'd have liked to stay in the public sector, but if it doesn't pay the bills (and it doesn't) then that really isn't an option. My ex-colleagues are on strike today and I feel quite conflicted, because I wish I was there fighting with them.

@cstross My cat also chases his tail. He has a favourite toy that is one of those sort of fluffy tail things on a string on a stick that can be waved around. My 8yo son has taken to draping the string on the toy over the cat's back end so that he not only has his own tail to chase, he also has the tail on his toy that then follows him around. The result is somewhere between ecstasy and terminal confusion.

“When I’ve asked how many years do you intend to not even give us an inflation pay rise, we haven’t had an answer,” Mick Whelan of ASLEF in the Guardian

I was involved (in a small way) with civil service pay on the trade union side from about 2010 up to last year, and this is the thing. The UK government patently does not believe that pay should keep pace with inflation. Or to put it another way, they believe it is right to make their own staff poorer over time by stealth. Eventually there is no option but to strike or leave the job, because it is obvious that otherwise your living standards will fall and fall until you cannot make ends meet.

@tradeunion #tradeunion #UKstrike #civilservice #aslef #traindrivers #pay