The headline is real and was part of CNN's live coverage of Trump's rally. However, archived URLs prove it was published as media outlets were attempting to figure out what was going on, and before any news outlet could reasonably report that an attempted assassination had occurred.
In the immediate aftermath of the attempted assassination of former U.S. President Donald Trump on July 13, 2024 in Butler, Pennsylvania, confusion reigned supreme as everyone tried to figure out what was going on.
But according to some users on X, CNN mishandled the initial confusion. Several posts criticized a supposed headline run by the outlet, reading "Secret Service rushes Trump offstage after he falls at rally."
The headline supposedly ran as part of CNN's live coverage of Trump's rally.
Snopes used the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine in order to determine whether the headline was real, and discovered that it was. However, the posts on X left out important context about the headline that is necessary to mention.
First, live coverage is often written in a Twitter-like feed, with a link to a general thread on the topic to which writers can add subheadings and paragraphs to as the event unfolds. This is exactly how CNN structured its coverage of the Trump rally, and the criticized headline in question was one such subheading.
Second, the criticized subheading wasn't the first subheading — that one, published quite literally as the shooting took place, read: "Trump falls to the ground onstage at rally; unclear what is happening." Within the next minute (determined using math on the timestamps), the subheading was updated to read "Secret Service rushes Trump off stage after he falls at rally."
It is the ethical responsibility of news coverage to share the basic facts of the matter and not spread misinformation. However, when something unexpected happens and there's almost no confirmed information, that can be significantly difficult.
As such, updating the subheading under the assumption that Trump had fallen, as initially described with no more information, was not a particularly large reach.
Think of what the reaction would have been if the opposite had happened: What if CNN had reported there was an attempted assassination on Trump when no such thing had occurred? The best practice here is to be safe, rather than sorry, when covering stories like this.
The subheading remained for roughly two more hours, before CNN's team changed it to remove the reference to the president falling. Because the coverage would come to be defined by the attempted assassination, the main header was also changed to reference the shooting. Therefore, people who saw the subheading in question would have already known that this was an assassination attempt and it would be redundant information to repeat it in the subheading in question.