I will chastise any news organization that distorts the truth. But CNN took withering criticism from the president and dozens of conservative media outlets alleging that they scripted a Parkland High student, who did not appear on their town hall. No outlet was more relentless in attacking CNN than Fox News, especially Tucker Carlson.
Carlson said tonight that “there is no evidence” that CNN tried to script a Parkland High student’s question.
What Carlson needed to say…
What the president needs to say…
And what all those other media outlets need to say…
is that Colton Haab’s father has admitted that he distributed a doctored email thread between his son and a CNN producer.
What I don’t hear are apologies coming from the president or from Fox News. And that’s unfortunate because if you study fraud-based journalism, you’ll learn that people like W.R. Hearst helped goad the U.S. into the Spanish-American War.
You may have heard the phrase “yellow journalism” which was the term used then for “fake news”. Hearst sent a famous illustrator to Cuba, who reported that there were no hostilities there. “You send the picture, I’ll send the war,” was his reply.
Fast-forward a few decades and Hearst is publishing interviews with Hitler, Mussolini and Goring in the mid-1930s.
In other words, we’ve been here before. And when lies are allowed to be published without challenge and retractions use mealy-mouthed phrases, the danger of repeating past mistakes rises.
CNN sensationalizes a lot of content. But they didn’t take advantage of a Parkland survivor. The young man’s father did that. And Fox News beat the drums for a week. Their actions potentially harmed life-saving societal change that the Parkland kids are helping us see are necessary to decrease the amount of gun violence in our country.
And Fox News doesn’t seem to give a damn about that. If you’re a viewer, perhaps you should consider this a representative story of so much of the agenda that they push. If you’ve read this far, you clearly believe in truth. If you insist on watching Fox News, perhaps you can also balance it with information from other, non-partisan sources.
As for the president, his behavior continues to lead him down a path of becoming one of the most reviled people to ever hold the office. If you support him, you don’t care. If you oppose him, you simply add this lie about CNN that he repeated to a worldwide stage to the list of nearly 2,000 lies he has told while in office.
This should startle you:
Of the more than 360 access-related gun bills proposed by Congress since the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, only one has become law, according to an Axios analysis (by Haley Britzky, Chris Canipe and Andrew Witherspoon) of congressional bill data from ProPublica.— Axios
The only bill to become law, the Federal Law Enforcement Self-Defense and Protection Act of 2015, declares that a federal law enforcement official is allowed to carry federally-issued firearms during a furlough.
It’s time to end the NRA’s stranglehold on Congress.
Call your rep at 202.224.3121. Tell the nice person who answers that you want common-sense gun legislation that protect us and our families.