CNN denied the claim of a Parkland student that the network tried to script him for a town hall meeting that followed the tragic shooting at the Florida school. “On Friday, CNN released the emails between Colton Haab, his father Glenn Haab and network producer Carrie Stevenson,” Justin Caruso reported in The Daily Caller on February 24, 2018. “Screenshots of the emails were published on The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple Blog and on Mediaite.”
“The emails show Haab sending CNN producer Carrie Stevenson a number of questions, including the question: ‘Have we thought about having a class for teachers who are willing to be armed trained to carry on campus?’ Then, in another email from Stevenson to Glenn Haab, the producer says that she had talked on the phone with Colton and said, ‘He needs to stick to this.’
“She then had a question in the body of the email that read, ‘Senator Nelson, if Coach Feis had had his firearm in school that day, I believe he could have most likely stopped the threat. Have we thought about having a class for teachers who are willing to be armed trained to carry on campus?’ The second sentence is one of the exact questions that Colton himself submitted to Stevenson.
“Glenn Haab then wrote back, ‘We are not actors nor do we read from a script,’ adding that if the only thing CNN wanted Colton for was to ask one quick question, then ‘we are not the right people for your town hall meeting.’
The most important part of the emails released by CNN is the network’s contention that a doctored version of the email was being sent around to media outlets.
“A copy of the email from Stevenson to Glenn Haab, provided to Fox News and HuffPost, shows that a sentence of Stevenson’s appears to be edited. The sentence that originally read, ‘This is what Colton and I discussed on the phone that he submitted. He needs to stick to this,’ was edited to have ‘that he submitted’ removed.
“‘This is what Colton and I discussed on the phone. He needs to stick to this,’ the sentence ended up reading, an omission that had the effect of making CNN’s intentions look nefarious when they actually were not.”
