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CNN Agrees To Town Halls With 4 More Presidential Candidates

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Mike Brest Reporter
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CNN agreed to host four more presidential town halls Monday with Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan and California Rep. Eric Swalwell.

Bennet will be the first of the four to participate in the event, which is scheduled for May 30, according to CNN. It will be moderated by Dana Bash. Moulton, Ryan, and Swalwell will all participate in town halls later that week on June 2. Each one will be moderated by a different journalist.

The most recent Morning Consult poll, collected from May 6 to May 12, 2019, revealed that Bennet and Ryan each received 1% from those surveyed. Neither Moulton or Swalwell reached that marker. The poll interviewed 15,342 registered voters.

The network has already hosted 20 presidential town halls this election cycle, with another one scheduled with former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke scheduled for later this week. The previous town halls have averaged approximately 900,000 viewers.

Swalwell’s town hall announcement comes a week after he told CNN that Fox News declined to a host a town hall with him. (RELATED: Fox News Reportedly Turned Down Swalwell Town Hall Request)

“I would absolutely do a Fox town hall,” Swalwell stated last week. “But they told us we can’t have one which is a little bit confusing to us because they have given them to people who are polling at the same place as us.”

Fox News disputed that claim, suggesting that the door was still open for a future event.

“Our attitude has been, ‘Let’s do some town halls but be selective about it,’” Bill Sammon, Fox’s senior vice president of news, told The Washington Post last week. “There are two dozen candidates. We’re not going to get to all of them. That’s just reality. So let’s carefully select the promising candidates and space them out a bit. We’re not going to put them on every night or five in one night. We’ll do it every couple or three weeks and have an impact.”

Fox News has only hosted three presidential debates compared to 20 on CNN.

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