CNN is not out of the woods with the allegations that it scripted questions for their town hall event, which quickly went off the rails, devolving into a two-hour bashing of law-abiding gun owners and the National Rifle Association. Colton Haab, a survivor of the February 14 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, alleged that CNN re-wrote his question, and that they told him to “stick to the script.” Well, it seems that wasn’t the case; a doctored email allegedly from CNN was circulated to Fox News and the Huffington Post, which prompted the network to release the email exchange (via Business Insider):
On Friday afternoon, Fox News and the HuffPost reached out to CNN to verify emails between the Haabs and Stevenson that they received from Colton.
A CNN source provided Colton's version of the emails, as well as their versions of all of the communications between the Haabs and CNN, to Business Insider.
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.
"It is unfortunate that an effort to discredit CNN and the town hall with doctored emails has taken any attention away from the purpose of the event," a CNN spokesman told Business Insider. "However, when presented with doctored email exchanges, we felt the need to set the record straight."
Glenn did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Yet, CNN is not out of the woods yet. They still need to explain Andrew Klein’s accusation that the network only wants people who push gun control. Klein’s daughter survived the shooting as well. While the CNN producer who spoke with Klein didn’t mention guns, he took “the espouse a certain narrative” as a reference to gun control (via Washington Examiner):
Andrew Klein, whose daughter attends Stoneman Douglas High School, says that a CNN producer told him the day after the shooting they were looking for people to do interviews who would "espouse a certain narrative which was taking the tragedy and turning it into a policy debate." pic.twitter.com/1NqflLpoou
— Ryan Saavedra ???? (@RealSaavedra) February 23, 2018
The father of a survivor of last week's school shooting in Parkland, Fla., said Thursday night that a CNN producer “insinuated” to him that the network was looking for people to interview that would “espouse a certain narrative."
Andrew Klein, whose daughter survived the school shooting, told Laura Ingraham on Fox News Thursday that he spoke to a CNN producer the day after the shooting, Feb. 15., and he took away from the conversation that they wanted to interview people that wanted to talk about the “policy implications of what happened in terms of preventing future mass shootings.”
[…]
“The producer insinuated to me they were looking for people to espouse a certain narrative, which was taking the tragedy and turning it into a policy debate. And I read that as being a gun control debate,” Klein said.