It is now pretty clear that Parkland, Florida shooting survivor Colton Haab was mistaken when he accused CNN of doctoring comments at its town hall about gun violence with students from Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last week. It’s time for Tucker Carlson, who credulously gave Haab a platform to tell his story, to come clean about it.
It doesn’t look as though Fox News investigated Haab’s accusation despite the fact that anyone with even a passing familiarity of broadcast news should have had a sense of the perfectly legitimate actions by CNN. That is, unless there’s an ulterior agenda.
As Haab told it on Tucker Carlson Tonight last week, he had planned to be part of CNN’s town hall and was asked to “write a speech” by producer Carrie Stevenson only to be told later to turn his speech into questions. Then he was told to ask only one question which, he claimed, CNN had scripted for him. Haab also revealed to Fox viewers that he had told CNN he wanted to argue that teachers should be armed in order to prevent another tragedy such as the one he had just lived through.
NewsHounds readers will know why the network would find this story too irresistible to closely scrutinize: It provided both the opportunity to play conservative victim of the liberal media and to bash CNN as “fake news,” just like Fan-in-Chief Donald Trump does.
Here’s what Business Insider found out that Fox did not (my emphases added):
CNN says that Stevenson and Colton agreed on one question that Colton would ask, but that Haab’s father, Glenn Haab, intervened, sending a lengthy speech ... that he wanted Colton to read, which included three questions for lawmakers.
Stevenson responded that the speech was “way too long” and that Colton “needs to stick” to the question they agreed on. Glenn then responded that he and his son “are not actors” and that Colton would not participate in the town hall if he could not read the full speech.
[…]
In CNN’s version of one email, Stevenson told Glenn that Colton needed to stick to a question that he and Stevenson “discussed on the phone that he submitted.” But in the version of the email provided by Colton to Fox and HuffPost, the phrase, “that he submitted” is deleted. … According to the metadata of the Word document containing the email that was provided to Fox, it appears that Glenn last edited it.
You can read the copies of the emails for yourself at Business Insider.
But, really, common sense suggests what happened. The TV producer wanted to make sure the questions were pithy and TV-friendly, not long, rambling speeches that would take up too much air time.
The incident does raise questions about what young Haab’s father's behavior but given the trauma that the family had just gone through, I do not want to dwell on that. Let’s just assume there was a legitimate misunderstanding, especially on Colton’s part.
Carlson, however, had no such excuse. His whole goal seemed to be to promote Colton Haab’s claim with as little scrutiny as possible:
Carlson opened the interview with an obvious aim of validating Colton Haab’s version of events:
CARLSON: We think the only way to put a dent in this scourge is to have a rational, thoughtful conversation about what to do next. And with that in mind, you were planning to go to this event last night. And tell me if I’m mischaracterizing any of this and, at the request of a CNN producer, you sent in a number of questions, statements you wanted to make, questions that you wanted to ask of the politicians on the stage and they rewrote one of your questions? Is that right?
“Yes, sir,” Haab said. He then told his story of writing an essay turned into a question about arming teachers. “I had talked about arming the teachers, if they were willing to arm themselves in the school, to carry on campus, and [the producer] had taken that, on what I had briefed on, and actually wrote that question out for me.”
It did not seem to occur to Carlson that maybe the producer’s written-out question matched what Haab had wanted to say, even if not verbatim. Nor did Carlson ask what the difference was between the two. Maybe he didn’t want to know the answer. Instead, he feigned asking.
CARLSON: I just want to make sure I have this straight. So you sent them a long, in effect, essay on what you thought but they put their own words in the question and they weren’t the same as the words you had sent in, they were the producer’s words?
HAAB: Absolutely. They had taken what I had wrote and what I had briefed on and what I had talked about and they actually wrote the question for me.
CARLSON: But not with your words. I mean, they put their own words into your question, even after they’d asked you to send questions in.
Later, Carlson urged Haab to suggest that the entire town hall was scripted:
CARLSON: So if CNN was willing to reword your question, put their own words in your mouth and, as you said, you didn’t want to go along with that, do you think they did that to other people?
Now, Carlson is the one who works for a news organization with the resources to investigate. Instead, he relied on this one traumatized kid who seemed to have no personal knowledge about anyone else’s experience.
“Absolutely,” Haab nevertheless told Carlson. But his “proof” was that the students read questions from slips of paper that he knew “for a fact” they had not cut up. Why would they all have the “same-size piece of paper with a short, little question on it?” Haab asked accusingly.
Obviously, CNN had the students' questions in advance. It seems quite plausible and non-sinister that the network would have printed them out as reminders. After all, Trump went into his meeting with notes that Fox defended. These were traumatized, non-professional teenagers who might suddenly go blank before the camera.
And if CNN had really scripted questions, why is Haab the only making the accusation?
Yet Carlson all but confirmed this conspiracy theory: “You’re not just some person off the street, you’re a survivor of this shooting and the point was to listen to you, to the survivors of the shooting. Were you surprised by the way they behaved?”
“Honestly, it was very shocking to me,” Haab replied.
“It’s shocking to us, too, trust me, in the actual journalism business,” Carlson said, without a trace of irony.
Watch Carlson pull the wool over his viewers’ eyes – and use a traumatized teen to do it – below, from the February 22, 2018 Tucker Carlson Tonight. As I write this, Carlson has not corrected the record. If he does, I’ll report it.