'Crowd broke into chants of Trump': CNN reporter exposes Fox News women's town hall scam
Donald Trump tried to win over skeptical women voters this week at a town hall event in Georgia, but CNN's Hadas Gold revealed there weren't many persuadable women there.
Her fact-checking colleague Daniel Dale determined the former president made at least 19 false claims during the question-and-answer session in Milton, about a half hour north of Atlanta, and Gold reported that host network Fox News wasn't entirely forthcoming with viewers about the women in the audience.
"Oh, it wasn't just friendly – the audience was stacked with Trump supporters," Gold said. "Now Fox presented this town hall as just an all women's town hall, general voters. Never in their press release did they say who was going to be sitting in the audience. But in reality, the room was not only full of Trump supporters, people who are voting for Trump, but also people who are officially part of Republicans' women's organizations. In fact, the first person who asked a question, she presented herself as Lisa from Milton, Georgia. She's actually Lisa [Cauley] president of the Fulton County Republican women's group, so she is essentially almost a Republican official... We saw people come up wearing Trump pins, there was somebody who had an RNC delegate hat."
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Trump has repeatedly attacked CBS News for editing a portion of its "60 Minutes" interview with Kamala Harris for a social media promotional clip, but Gold alleged that Fox News clipped out one woman's comments that suggested she was an election denier.
"I think the most egregious thing that happened in this town hall was in one of the questions by a woman named Alicia," Gold said. "In the middle of her question, she said the following: 'I voted for you this morning, I hope they counted it' – something along those lines. But Fox edited out those handful of words in her question, so in the broadcast, all you saw was her asking a question. She did make joke about how the opposition probably sees the room being full of domestic terrorists, but those handful of words in the middle of the questions that [took] maybe all of you know, five seconds to say, those were selectively edited out. Why did Fox News do that? We asked them they have not said anything back."
The conservative network also clipped out other evidence that the audience was highly favorable to the Republican nominee, she said.
"Fox also edited out moments where the entire crowd broke out into chants of 'Trump, Trump, Trump,'" Gold said. "You could argue, okay, that was for time, maybe that took some time. But the reason we actually know that this happened is because CNN has an embed, Kate Sullivan, who travels with Trump and she was there listening to this event live. She recorded it live, and that's where we are able to see the contrast between what was edited out and what was kept in. Now, it's not a problem necessarily to have a town hall with a bunch of Trump supporters or Republicans – that's fine. Your issue is that Fox never discloses – not in their press release announcing the town hall, Harris Faulkner never said it on air, and anybody who got up and asked a question, they never said, 'I'm president of this Republican group.'"
Gold compared that to a town hall event hosted Wednesday night by Univision, where participants identified their party affiliation and voting history.
"That's the difference and that's why that disclosure matters," she said, "because a regular voter's watching, saying, 'Oh, these women, they're just a bunch of regular voters out there,' and they were not just regular voters."
"They could have called it a pep rally instead of a town hall," added CNN's Jim Acosta.
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