CNN Claims Father Of School Shooting Hero May Have Altered Email To Fuel “Fake News” Charges
CNN is claiming Glenn Haab, father of 17-year-old Florida school shooting hero Colton Haab, sent “doctored” copies of a producer’s email to Fox News and HuffPost in an effort to make it look like the news outlet was scripting its town hall meeting.
The father’s version of the email seemed to show CNN producer Carrie Stevenson fed Colton Haab a scripted question for the news channel’s town hall meeting with legislators following the shooting.
However, CNN responded with its own version of the email, sending it to Business Insider. That email showed that the student had discussed potential questions with Stevenson based on his own ideas for possible discussion topics.
In the CNN version, Stevenson states, “This is what Colton and I discussed on the phone that he submitted. He needs to stick to this.”
The Haab email version sent to Fox and HuffPost eliminated the “that he submitted” verbiage, making it seem as though the question came from the producer.
In both versions of the email, CNN producer Carrie Stevenson rejected Colton Haab’s idea for a speech that he wrote. Instead, she ask for one question “so that we can get to as many people as possible.”
Colton Haab eventually dropped out of the town hall event.
Glenn Haab responded to Stevenson’s note to cancel his son’s appearance, writing, “We are not actors nor do we read from a script…I[f] you want Colton only to read this one short question — we are not the right people for your town hall meeting.”
The metadata of the Word document Glenn Haab shared with Fox News also showed that he was the last person to edit it, Business Insider reported.
The family of a Parkland shooting survivor appears to have provided doctored emails to Fox and HuffPost in an attempt to support their claim that CNN "scripted" its Wednesday town hall. https://t.co/AdiXw2lmRz pic.twitter.com/3O5EneClcK
— Eliza Relman (@eliza_relman) February 24, 2018
Colton Haab became a media focus when he took 60 to 70 people into a Junior ROTC room at the school when the school shooting started. He covered them with Kevlar sheets, used in the marksmanship program, as shields for the students.
President Trump made a comment on the Haab email, tweeting, “Just like so much of CNN, Fake News. That’s why their ratings are so bad! MSNBC may be worse.”
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