Saturday, June 27, 2026

Mike Pence Gets Dismal CNN Town Hall Ratings, Follows Same for Nikki Haley, Shows Why Network Fired Its Chief for Tone Deafness

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Mike Pence was not a draw for CNN.

His Town Hall with Dana Bash on Wednesday night pulled just 632,000 viewers. That’s little more than CNN gets at that hour anyway.

Pence’s Bash-ing comes on the heels of last Sunday’s outing with Nikki Haley, which had 562,000 eyes.

Neither of these failed attempts to re-create the Trump Town Hall with 3 million viewers worked. Why? Trump is a circus act, a carnival barker, a real time train wreck. Fox News viewers came to see their guy take on CNN, and he did. He won. (Now, of course, this really means nothing after last night’s indictment.)

The failures of these attempts to showcase Republican candidates is part of the reason CNN drop kicked its chief, Chris Licht, this week. He had a tin ear for the CNN audience. He didn’t know what they didn’t want. And they didn’t want these people.

Chris Christie is next. The numbers should be about the same, maybe a little higher as he will be dumping on Trump. But will the moderator go after Christie for all the stupid and evil things he did in New Jersey? Or is that a bridge too far?

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Roger Friedman
Roger Friedman
Roger Friedman is the founder and editor-in-chief of Showbiz411. He wrote the FOX411 column on FoxNews.com from 1999 to 2009, where he covered Michael Jackson, and previously wrote the "Intelligencer" column at New York magazine in the mid-1990s, where he covered the O.J. Simpson trial. He also edited Fame magazine. His bylines have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, Vogue, Details, and the Miami Herald. He is a voting member of the Critics Choice Awards (Film and Television branches), and his movie reviews are tracked by Rotten Tomatoes. With D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, he co-produced the 2002 documentary "Only the Strong Survive," which screened at Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival.

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