With great fanfare this week, CNN announced it would host the network’s first debate of the 2024 presidential campaign, gathering the Republican candidates for a marquee event on Jan. 21 at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire.

There was only one problem: Saint Anselm had no idea what CNN was talking about.

“We were surprised to be included on a press release by a network about a debate which we had not planned or booked,” Neil Levesque, executive director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm, said in a statement on Friday.

[The state Republican Party is similarly befuddled, because they had already arranged a debate at St. Anselm’s the same week … but with ABC. — Ed]