No, CNN’s Trump town hall was not cut short, it actually ran overtime

CLAIM: CNN cut short its primetime town hall with former President Donald Trump on Wednesday.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The cable news network says it had allotted one hour for the forum but it ended up running about 10 minutes longer. The New Hampshire college that hosted the event also confirmed the expected runtime for the event was an hour, not the nearly two hours that some claimed online.

THE FACTS: CNN’s Wednesday night town hall with the former president wrapped up at 9:09 p.m. EST — 69 minutes after it began at its scheduled time of 8 p.m.

Immediately following the broadcast, however, social media users began claiming that the network had deliberately truncated the event.

“Lol, CNN ended the town hall with Trump early,” one user on Twitter wrote in a post that’s been liked or shared more than 21,000 times as of Thursday. “Biggest ratings they’ve had in years and they tapped out.”

“Note: The CNN Town Hall was a 90 minute broadcast, though the network expected the actual event to go as long as 75 minutes,” wrote another Twitter user in a post that’s been liked or shared more than 4,000 times. “They stopped less than 70 minutes in. In other words, they could have gone longer if they wanted—which is usually what executives do with big ratings draws.”

But CNN officials maintain they always intended the broadcast to run an hour. In fact, they say, it ran slightly over the allotted time.

Matt Dornic, a senior vice president at CNN Worldwide, took to social media Thursday to address the claims, maintaining that network officials were consistent in the days leading up to the town hall that it would last just an hour.

“We gave it room to bleed over some for editorial flexibility,” he explained in a tweet. “It was ultimately just shy of 70 mins.”

The network didn’t respond to a follow up email seeking additional information on the tweet, but Paul Pronovost, a spokesperson for Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, where the forum was held, backed up Dornic’s comments.

“I can confirm that is what was shared with the college in advance as well,” he said in an email, referencing the one-hour run time.

Additionally, TV Guide’s listing for the Wednesday broadcast shows it was slotted from 8 p.m. to 9:15 p.m., or about 75 minutes. It was then followed by a show analyzing the event that ran until 11 p.m. and featured CNN anchors Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper and other experts.

During the forum, Trump took questions from CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins and a live audience of local voters who intend to vote in the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary.

The event came a day after a New York jury found the former president liable for sexually abusing a woman nearly 30 years ago and defaming her when she spoke about it publicly.

It also marked something of a denouement between the New York billionaire and CNN, which Trump infamously branded as “fake news” and refused to grant interviews to during his four years in the White House.

Wednesday’s broadcast helped the cable network draw 2.2 million viewers during primetime (8 p.m. to 11 p.m.), besting rivals Fox News and MSNBC, which drew roughly 1.6 million and 1.4 million viewers, respectively, according to Nielsen data CNN provided to The Associated Press.

It also marked the network’s best performance in prime time since the 2022 midterm elections in terms of total viewers, the network said. Among all CNN single-candidate town halls since 2016, the Trump forum ranked second in viewership behind a town hall featuring Joe Biden in 2020.

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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.