Right now there is a media frenzy about a high school student named Coltan Haab and CNN fighting over honesty, integrity, and a CNN Town Hall Meeting (you can probably guess who I’d pick by default).
Coltan Haab is an ROTC Student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, where on Wednesday, February 14, 2018, at about 2:30 local time, an evil killed entered the campus and started shooting students. It looks like 17 are dead and 15 were injured during a couple minutes of killing. After the fact, the killer slipped away to be arrested about one and a half hours later. Coltan reportedly shielded and helped other students survive during the rampage, then days after, he personally put two of his fellow classmates to rest.
CNN, for obvious reasons, wanted him to be part of their town hall meeting about the attack. He agreed. He was asked to write a speech and submit it, which he did. Then he was asked to write more questions and less speech, which he did. Then he was just asked to have questions, which he did. Then he was asked to do only one question and was given the question and told over the phone by a CNN person to stick to the script.
Here is the interview in his own words:
CNN’s response via twitter:
I had to leave the latest comment in when I took the screen shot above. You can follow the link if you’d like to see them all.
What I’ve found is the media lies all the time. Sometimes they don’t even realize what they are doing. It’s just what they do. Some is out and out lying and some is because they speak a different language than we do.
I’ll share a personal story from Iraq, 2003. I was a Marine, part of the invasion and we had just taken Tikrit, Saddam’s home town. We where sitting on the road to the main palace inside a large fortified area waiting for our next mission. We had taken the country but had not yet found Hussein or stomped out all of the already budding insurgency or evil Fedayeen Saddam (Saddam’s personal body guard force). This photo was taken by a journalist out of Los Angeles, California, and became the front page back home. I’m there in the back, the top of the head you can just barely see.
We had only seen a couple of reporters before this moment, but once the palace was taken, they came out of the woodwork and we saw dozens, probably close to 100, but I didn’t count. I was too busy asking everyone to borrow a satellite phone to call home. Finally, one did, and then another.
The second was a reporter for a news paper in Florida who seemed like a nice guy. He let us all make a phone call home for nothing, took some photos, and then traded a case of food for an expensive bottle of wine he had. Somehow he was out of food for the last couple days, but still had this bottle of wine. Being Marines, we gave up a case of MRE’s for the wine.
We swapped stories and told of daring does we had accomplished. It was fun to talk to someone outside our group from America after being in country and away for months.
I asked him about being a journalist in a war zone and surviving the trip. Then about making up news and staging photos. I told him our greatest fear of talking to the media was that they would change what was being said and what happened (i.e. fake news even though the term wasn’t around yet). He said he never did that and “would never stage a photo.”
While I was talking to him and he just said that, a couple other Marines were folding the flag from the above picture. He stopped me to get a picture of it which seemed legit. It was picture worthy. Then he asked the Marines to move so he could get a picture of the flag being folded, with the setting sun and palace in the background. It was a good photo and I wish I had a copy of it now, but it has been lost to time.
I think he truly believed that he never staged photos, but he at least changed them.
Now, CNN is doing the same thing. They probably just reworded his question, I’m hoping, to make it shorter and concise, but probably to help them and their ratings too.
As much as the media wants to say they don’t change the news, they all do. I’ve changed some things in this story by omitting all the details and only keeping what is needed to make a point. This article is already too long for most people on the internet today (thank you for being one of the smart ones and reading the entire thing, not just the headline).
My entire point here is to get your news overview from people you trust, not organizations. People you can know, news organizations have too many people with different opinions, beliefs, and duties for you to know what is really going on.
If you are interested in a story, you need to read multiple views from around the news and blogs to get enough information to really make an informed decision.
Comes down to the old Marine Corps folklore, “Don’t believe anything you hear, and only believe half of what you see.” Meaning, things always change by the time you hear anything. You can’t believe things in the Corps until after they have happened, because even when it is happening it could change, and does about half the time.
Find information for yourself and then vet the sources. Sources I used for the article:
- http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/02/22/florida-school-shooting-timeline.html
- https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/23/us/florida-school-shooting/index.html
- https://legalinsurrection.com/2018/02/student-colton-haab-stands-by-claim-cnn-rewrote-his-planned-questions-and-told-him-to-stick-to-the-script/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LegalInsurrection+%28Le·gal+In·sur·rec·tion%29
- https://mobile.twitter.com/CNNPR/status/966664545908461569?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Flegalinsurrection.com%2F2018%2F02%2Fstudent-colton-haab-stands-by-claim-cnn-rewrote-his-planned-questions-and-told-him-to-stick-to-the-script%2F
- Plus many more skimmed articles (these are just the ones I had left open on my browser when I finished writing this)
Stay Safe,
Ben
ps The Marine Corps saying “don’t believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see” goes double when something is “breaking news”. Wait and judge things for yourself when you have facts not just parroted crap.