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CNN is trying to rebrand itself as a down-the-middle, facts-only network.
Trump’s Wednesday town hall performance felt more like a rally than an attempt to keep him tethered to the truth.
CNN allowed a pro-Trump cheering crowd to laugh and root on lies about election fraud and other comments.

Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign event at the DoubleTree Manchester Downtown on Thursday, April 27, 2023, in Manchester, NH.
Jabin Botsford | The Washington Post | Getty Images

CNN still has a Donald Trump problem.
Under the leadership of new CEO Chris Licht, the cable news network wants to reimagine itself as a no-nonsense, politically down-the-middle product since Discovery’s merger with WarnerMedia last year.

Wednesday’s 70-minute town hall with Trump, moderated by anchor Kaitlan Collins, was CNN’s first big opportunity since the change of ownership to showcase itself as a network of facts. Licht told CNBC last year the network wants to hear from both Democrats and Republicans, but it won’t allow people to come on and say it’s raining when it’s not.
Trump has a history of peddling election fraud lies — an example of saying it’s raining when it’s not. But instead of forcing the former president to stay within the bounds of the truth, the town hall set up a dynamic where Trump ran roughshod over Collins, who repeatedly attempted to keep him from lying throughout the hour-plus event.
Collins gamely pointed out throughout the event when Trump was veering into fantasy land. That may have worked journalistically – had it not been for the fact that CNN inexplicably allowed a partisan audience to cheer on Trump’s running commentary throughout the event. The effect of the raucous crowd turned the town hall from a potentially probing interview into a de facto Trump rally, undermining Collins’ attempts at holding him to task.
At one point, bothered by Collins’ consistent attempt to tether Trump to the truth, Trump called Collins “a nasty person.” The crowd cheered.
Collins spent the first 20 minutes of the town hall discussing his refusal to back off election fraud claims, which have been consistently debunked by courts, election experts and even several prominent Republicans. She took a question from an audience member who asked if Trump would “suspend polarizing talk of election fraud” during his run for president.

Trump seemed confused by the question.
“If I see election fraud, I think I have an obligation to say it,” Trump said. “But the answer is yes.”
Collins followed up, “So you will suspend talk, to his question, about the 2020 election on the campaign trail?”
Trump answered with a nonanswer: “Well, I guess we’re going to just win. We’re at a point now. We’re getting so close. Let’s just win it again and straighten out our country.”
About 10 seconds later, he followed with: “The Constitution says that we’re supposed to have legal and well-maintained and well-looked-at elections. And we didn’t have that.”
Collins again interjected that there’s no evidence of election fraud. Trump responded by saying he knows she has an agenda but “that was a horrible election” and “unless someone is very stupid” before trailing off and not finishing the thought.
In other words, Trump said he’d suspend talk about the 2020 election fraud and then, seconds later, spoke about 2020 election fraud. Moreover, he brushed off Collins’ attempt at keeping him within the bounds of reality as having an agenda.
This is the Trump problem in a nutshell. Live fact-checking Trump in an interview is extremely difficult because he will steamroll most interviewers with a torrent of words.

CNN reaction

“Tonight Kaitlan Collins exemplified what it means to be a world-class journalist,” CNN said in a statement. “She asked tough, fair and revealing questions. And she followed up and fact-checked President Trump in real time to arm voters with crucial information about his positions as he enters the 2024 election as the Republican frontrunner. That is CNN’s role and responsibility: to get answers and hold the powerful to account.”
Licht followed up Thursday morning with an internal staff address, saying he thought the event “absolutely, unequivocally” served America.
“You don’t have to like the president’s answers but you can’t say we didn’t get them,” Licht said, according to a transcript obtained by CNBC. “That’s our job – to get answers. And we held him accountable like no other news organization in years.”
But even CNN executives must have realized Collins didn’t really hold Trump to account on Wednesday. Her attempts at keeping him on track were admirable but tantamount to an exhausted parent trying and failing to keep her children from eating their Halloween candy after trick-or-treating. Plus, CNN had added a crowd of hundreds to cheer every time a child ate a piece of candy.
“While it might’ve been uncomfortable to hear people clapping in response to some of the president’s answers, that audience represents the views of a large swath of America,” Licht said. “The mistake the media made in the past is ignoring that they exist.”
The town hall was successful as an event in that it allowed CNN’s audience to again see Donald Trump, who is leading polls as the Republican front-runner to win the nomination in 2024. Viewers can now make their own minds up about what they saw.
Warner Bros. Discovery Chief Executive David Zaslav told CNBC last week why CNN allowed Trump to participate in a town hall despite his history of election fraud lies.
“For us, the focus is let’s get the message right, let’s get the brand right, let’s the get the balance right,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “There are a number of advocacy networks out there. Our focus is to be a network of facts, the best version of the facts, as Carl Bernstein would say, great journalism, and not just politics, but when we do politics, we need to represent both sides.”
From an event-planning perspective, the setup of the town hall didn’t allow for the best version of facts to be presented. That may be an olive branch for Trump supporters, but it isn’t the best journalism.
WATCH: Jury finds Donald Trump did sexually abuse E. Jean Carroll, awards her $5 million in total damages. More

The Biden administration’s decision to end the emergency comes as deaths and hospitalizations from Covid are at their lowest point since March 2020.
Hospitals will lose flexibility to add bed capacity if Covid surges, and the CDC will have less data to track the spread of Covid.
While public health experts agree the U.S. has many more tools to fight Covid today, they warn the virus will remain a persistent threat to the nation’s battered health-care system.

A sign outside of a hospital advertises COVID-19 testing on November 19, 2021 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images

The U.S. public health emergency declared in response to Covid-19 comes to an end Thursday more than three years after the pandemic began.
The Biden administration’s decision to end the emergency comes as deaths and hospitalizations have declined dramatically due to the availability of vaccines, antiviral treatments and widespread exposure to the virus.

Deaths from Covid have fallen to their lowest point since March 2020, when the rapid spread of the virus in the U.S. overwhelmed the health system and lead to widespread shutdowns of schools, businesses and public venues.
Hospital admissions from the virus have also fallen to the lowest level since the U.S. started tracking the data in August 2020.
The end of the emergency will bring significant changes in how the U.S. responds to the virus. Hospitals will lose flexibility to rapidly add bed capacity if patient admissions surge, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will scale back its efforts to track the virus.
After the emergency ends, the CDC will no longer be able to compel labs to report Covid test results. The agency does not have the authority to compel U.S. states to report new cases.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who will step down at the end of June, warned Congress last week that the agency still has to negotiate data-sharing agreements with individual jurisdictions, a time-consuming process that puts the nation at risk.

“This should worry us all primarily because of what it says about the visibility we will have into the next outbreak,” Walensky told the Senate health committee. “We will be back to square one having to build and negotiate surveillance capacity while we fight a pathogen.”
While public health experts agree the U.S. has many more tools to fight Covid today, they warn the virus will remain a persistent threat to the elderly, the vulnerable and the nation’s fragmented, battered health-care system.
“I think we’ve passed the worst now, but there’s going to be a steady drumbeat of hospitalizations and deaths for many years to come,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University.

The virus is still killing

The U.S. public health emergency has been renewed 13 times since the Trump administration first issued the declaration on Jan. 31, 2020, when there were just six known cases of Covid and no known deaths in the U.S.
In the three years since then, Covid has killed more than 1.1 million people in the U.S. and hospitalized millions more in the worst public health crisis since the influenza pandemic more than a century earlier in 1918.
The virus was the fourth-leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2022 – two years after Covid first emerged – behind only heart disease, cancer and unintentional injuries.
The World Health Organization declared an end to the global Covid emergency on Friday. But WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned national governments against dismantling the systems they built to respond to the virus.
“This virus is here to stay. It is still killing, and it’s still changing. The risk remains of new variants emerging that cause new surges in cases and deaths,” Tedros said.

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More than 1,000 people are still dying a week from Covid in the U.S., the overwhelming majority of whom are age 75 or older, as the public has largely lost interest in staying up to date on vaccines.
Only 42% of seniors are up to date on their Covid vaccines, according to CDC data. Just 17% of the total U.S. population has gotten the latest booster.
“You need to remain up to date to have adequate protection,” said Dr. James Lawler, infectious disease expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
“Similar to immunity from vaccination, surviving Covid gives you immunity, but that immunity doesn’t last,” Lawler said.
The Biden administration says the end of the emergency will not impact access to Covid vaccines and antiviral treatments, because there’s still a federal stockpile, but many consumers will have to start paying for Covid tests.
Gostin said a misinformation campaign against vaccines, particularly in conservative states, as well as a general vaccine fatigue has put the nation’s health at risk.
Meanwhile, millions of people are at risk of losing coverage through Medicaid, the public health insurance program for lower-income people, as states are now allowed to review eligibility for the first time in years. Congress basically banned states from kicking people off Medicaid during the pandemic, but these protections expired in April.
“We’re going to see the unravelling of the social and health-care safety net over the next months,” Gostin said. “There will be a surge in uninsurance and people lacking access to health care,” he said.

Health system battered

Hospitals have been battered by repeated Covid waves over the past three years, with many health-care facilities facing staffing shortages as many doctors and nurses suffer burnout.
With the end of the emergency, hospitals will lose the flexibility to rapidly add beds in unconventional settings and tap doctors in training to help with surges in patient admissions.
Leading medical associations warned the Biden administration last fall that emergency departments were at a breaking point with patients forced to wait due to inadequate bed capacity and staffing.
And hospitals now face the persistent threat of Covid on top of disease from flu and and respiratory syncytial virus, which already strained capacity during bad respiratory virus seasons prior to the pandemic.
“We have really lost so much health-care capacity in this country by loss of beds, loss of health-care workers,” said Michael Osterholm, a leading epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy in Minnesota.
“We better hope we’re not going to see a big surge in infectious disease cases of any kind in the months to years ahead,” Osterholm said.
Lawler, who advised the Bush and Obama administrations on biodefense and pandemic preparedness, said hospitals may need the flexibilities provided by the public health emergency if there are major Covid surges again in the future.
“I am not optimistic that once the public health emergency declaration goes away, that anybody in Washington is going to be eager to declare another, even if it’s warranted,” he said. More

A Republican law has slashed the average tax rates of Big Pharma companies by more than 40% since it was enacted in 2017, Senate Finance Committee Democrats said in a report.
The GOP bill allowed U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies to access lower tax rates on their foreign income.
The committee said drugmakers AbbVie, Abbott Laboratories, Amgen, Bristol Myers Squibb and Merck all report most of their tax income overseas.

(L-R) Richard A. Gonzalez, chairman and CEO of AbbVie Inc., Pascal Soriot, executive director and CEO of AstraZeneca, Giovanni Caforio, chairman of the board and CEO of Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., Jennifer Taubert, executive vice president and worldwide chairman of Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Johnson & Johnson, Kenneth C. Frazier, chairman and CEO of Merck & Co. Inc., Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, and Olivier Brandicourt, CEO of Sanofi testify in front of the Senate Finance Committee on ‘Drug Pricing in America: A Prescription for Change, Part II’ on February 26, 2019 in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, DC.
Win McNamee | Getty Images

A Republican law has slashed the average tax rates of big pharmaceutical companies by more than 40% since it was enacted in 2017, Senate Finance Committee Democrats said in a report Thursday. 
“Democrats warned in 2017 that the Republican tax law was going to amount to a massive giveaway to multinational corporations, and here’s the proof that that’s exactly what happened,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D.-Ore., the committee’s chair, said in a press release on the report. 

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The GOP’s $1.5 trillion Tax Cuts and Jobs Act brought sweeping changes to the tax code, including a provision that essentially imposed a worldwide minimum tax on foreign earnings. 
That provision allowed U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies to access lower tax rates on their foreign income, the report said. 
It also created a “huge incentive” for those companies to put their profits, investments and jobs overseas, Democrats added in the report.
Pharmaceutical companies report 75% of their taxable income overseas, the report said.
The pharmaceutical industry paid a tax rate of about 20% on average from 2014 to 2016, the years right before the law passed, acccording to the commitee’s analysis.

The report said the average rate fell to 11.6% in 2019 and 2020, which resulted in billions of dollars in tax savings for pharmaceutical companies. 
“There’s no question that the tax system was broken prior to 2017, but instead of fixing it, Republicans gave Big Pharma a green light for some of the most aggressive tax gaming highly trained accountants can dream up,” Wyden said.
He called for significant tax reform to ensure huge corporations “pay their fair share, while helping to spur investment in the U.S., not in foreign countries.” 
The report is the latest in Wyden’s investigation into Big Pharma’s tax practices. The Oregon senator said the committee will release a final report on the probe later this year.
Lawmakers have long criticized the industry for its skyrocketing drug prices, which can shut out some patients from accessing life-saving medicines. Wyden’s probe only adds fuel to that fire.
In July, Wyden released a report detailing how drugmaker AbbVie used offshore subsidiaries to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes on prescription drug sales. 
That report found that Chicago-based AbbVie generated 75% of its sales from U.S. patients in 2020, but reported only 1% of its taxable income in the country. 
That report alleged that AbbVie holds its intellectual property in a Bermuda-based subsidiary with no employees or other major operations. Bermuda imposed no taxes on that subsidiary’s profits, income, dividends or capital gains.
Wyden also obtained similar information about other U.S. pharmaceutical companies, including Abbott Laboratories, Amgen, Bristol Myers Squibb and Merck. 
For most of the companies, more than 80% of their taxable income was reported overseas.
Some of the companies have defended their tax approach in the wake of the committee’s investigation.
The companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wyden’s findings. More

Soft skills matter to employers. Writing in the Harvard Business Review last year, Raffaella Sadun of Harvard Business School and her co-authors analysed almost 5,000 job descriptions that Russell Reynolds, a headhunter, had developed for a variety of C-suite roles between 2000 and 2017. Their work showed that companies have shifted away from emphasising financial and operational skills towards social skills—an ability to listen, reflect, communicate and empathise. Other research has reached similar conclusions about jobs lower down the pay scale: being able to work well with people is seen not as some fluffy bonus but as a vital attribute. Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

SIX DECADES ago, when Japan’s carmakers were minnows outside their home market, the future giants of global car manufacturing—Toyota, Nissan and Honda among them—began to expand production in Thailand. The South-East-Asian country’s early presence in the automotive supply chains means it is the tenth-largest producer of cars in the world, surpassing countries like France and Britain.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

At the steelworks near the German city of Salzgitter, ironmaking is a dramatic affair. Red-hot molten metal pours forth from the bottom of towering blast furnaces. The noise is deafening. Sparks fly everywhere. Soon things will be much more sedate. Seven wind turbines already tower over the site, run by a firm called Salzgitter AG. In a few years the electricity they generate will power banks of electrolysers, container-sized machines that split water into oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen will replace coke in reducing iron ore to iron in a new type of furnace, which will operate at much lower temperatures. Instead of CO2, the process will emit H2O. Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio and podcasts on More

Polestar trimmed its full-year production guidance, saying that its upcoming Polestar 3 SUV will be delayed until 2024.
The Swedish EV maker said its net loss narrowed dramatically compared with a year ago.
Polestar also said it will cut about 10% of its workforce.

Polestar 3
Courtesy: Polestar

Swedish electric vehicle maker Polestar on Thursday trimmed its full-year production guidance, saying that its upcoming Polestar 3 SUV will be delayed until 2024 because of software issues.
The company also said it will cut about 10% of its workforce to reduce costs. Shares were down over 4% in premarket trading following the news.

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The news came as part of Polestar’s first-quarter earnings report.
For the period ended March 31, Polestar’s net loss was $9 million, or less than a penny per share, thanks to about $213.4 million in positive changes in the valuation of some of Polestar’s obligations related to its merger with a special-purpose acquisition company last year. A year ago, the company’s net loss was $274.5 million, or 14 cents per share.
On an adjusted basis, excluding the accounting changes, the company lost $222.4 million in the period, or about 10 cents per share.
Revenue grew to $546 million from $452.2 million a year earlier.
Polestar had $884.3 million in cash remaining as of March 31, down from $973.9 million as of the end of 2022.

Polestar cut its full-year production guidance to between 60,000 and 70,000 vehicles in 2023, down from 80,000 in its earlier outlook, because the launch of the upcoming Polestar 3 SUV will be delayed until 2024. The company had originally planned to begin deliveries of the model in China before the end of this year.
The Polestar 3 will be based on a new platform shared by Polestar and Volvo Cars. Polestar said it was “recently informed” that more time will be needed to finalize software for that new platform. It now expects to begin shipping the Polestar 3 in the first quarter of 2024.
The company’s other upcoming new model, a smaller crossover SUV called Polestar 4, is still on track to launch in China in the fourth quarter of 2023, and elsewhere in early 2024.  
“We are taking necessary steps to strengthen Polestar in the near-term,” CEO Thomas Ingenlath said. “While production of Polestar 3 will now start in the first quarter of 2024, the successful launch of Polestar 4 last month means that we add two strong offers in the attractive electric SUV market in 2024. I am confident that we will deliver on our growth ambitions and path towards profitability.” More

Best Buy is rolling out a new version of its membership program called My Best Buy in late June.
The retailer is renaming the program and offering lower-priced options.
It wants to grow the program as it braces for a slower year of sales.

A shopper exits a Best Buy store during Black Friday sales in Brooklyn, New York, November 26, 2021.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters

Best Buy said Thursday that it will double down on its membership program as consumers buy fewer discretionary items.
Starting June 27, the program will have three tiers, including a lower-priced option that offers perks like exclusive discounts and access to hot products, the consumer electronics retailer said. The program will also have a new name: My Best Buy memberships.

Best Buy is looking for ways to make money and drive customer loyalty as it deals with a drop in demand. Consumers are buying fewer electronics as they cope with higher prices of food and essentials, and some prioritize spending on travel, restaurants and other services. Plus, during the early years of the pandemic, many shoppers sprang for new laptops, home-theater systems and kitchen appliances — the kinds of purchases that people don’t often repeat in the near term.
The company said in March that it expects revenue to range between $43.8 billion and $45.2 billion this fiscal year. The total would represent a drop from $46.3 billion from the year-earlier period, and from $51.8 billion the year before that — but a revenue increase from before the pandemic.

CEO Corie Barry told investors on a March earnings call that Best Buy expects this calendar year to “be the bottom for the decline in tech demand.” She said spending will bounce back because U.S. households have a record number of tech devices and will want to upgrade or replace them, especially as vendors debut innovative products.
In the meantime, Best Buy also has taken steps to cut costs. It has had at least two rounds of layoffs, one in August and one in April. The company confirmed the job cuts, but declined to share any numbers.

Best Buy leans into loyalty

Best Buy debuted its membership program, TotalTech, nationwide two years ago. The program grew to 5.8 million members by late January — adding up to nearly $1.2 billion in annual revenue. That’s up from 4.6 million members the prior year.

The paying members are a fraction of the about 100 million people in the retailer’s loyalty program, of which 40 million to 45 million are active.
As part of its relaunch, Best Buy’s TotalTech will become the top tier of the membership program, but with a different name: My Best Buy Total. Its price will also drop from $199.99 per year to $179.99. That top tier includes round-the-clock tech support, up to two years of product protection and 20% off repairs, among other benefits.
The other two tiers are the retailer’s free loyalty program, which includes free shipping with no minimum purchase, or an option in the middle: My Best Buy Plus. The new $44.99 per year subscription includes members-only prices, free two-day shipping with no minimum purchase and an extended return policy.
Best Buy found that its varied customers wanted different perks, said Patrick McGinnis, senior vice president of memberships. Older customers tended to use the 24/7 tech support, while younger ones signed up for the members-only discounts and extended product protection.
McGinnis said the revamped program better fits those different budgets and needs. He declined to share an updated membership total and the program’s renewal rate.
On an earnings call in March, Barry said Best Buy is pleased with the program’s results. She said members shop more with the company, buy more across categories and rate their experience higher than nonmembers.
But she added the retailer is still tinkering to reduce costs. For instance, it added restocking fees for some product returns and removed same-day delivery as a benefit, the CEO said.
Joe Feldman, a retail analyst for the Telsey Advisory Group, recently downgraded the company’s stock from outperform to market perform and cut the price target to $81. He said Best Buy is a well-run company with a good strategy, but “they’re in a tough market right now.”
“People just aren’t buying electronics these days and you’re seeing it across the spectrum, whether it’s Walmart, Target, Costco, Amazon,” Feldman said. “Electronics just aren’t selling — especially big ticket electronics — and that’s been a pressure point for the past half a year or so.”
So far, he said the membership program “has not been a gangbusters success” when you consider how many customers Best Buy has.
Paying for a service that touts tech support and extended protection is a tougher sell if shoppers aren’t buying new devices, he added.
The program “often gets associated with a purchase, so some of it is chicken and egg,” Feldman said. “It makes it a challenge.”
Best Buy’s shares have fallen about 10% so far this year. Shares closed Wednesday at $72.22, down about 23% from its 52-week high.
Best Buy will report its fiscal first-quarter earnings later this month. More