Right Wing Echo Chamber Inaccurately Smears Mother Jones Story on Gun Fanatics

[alp227]

In response to the right wing hysteria over Mother Jones senior editor Mark Follman making up a story about gun control activist Jennifer Longdon watching a Moms Demand Action press conference on TV at the Indianapolis airport, this blog writes in response particularly to Gateway Pundit/Progressive Today blogger Jim Hoft:

Hoft’s entire chain of reasoning, however (to the degree you can call it that), is predicated upon the one assertion in his story which – perhaps unsurprisingly – has neither link nor attribution: “…since the Indianapolis airport airs CNN on their TV screens you’d think you could find their report on the protest on their website, right?” Not a link to be found for the assertion that the Indianapolis airport airs CNN on all of their TV screens. In such a well-documented piece, that omission seems curious, doesn’t it?

I called the Indianapolis airport and spoke with Joe Miller, the head of the Indianapolis airport’s IT department, which oversees the television contracts for the airport. He informed me that, while the TVs owned and operated by the airport itself do indeed show feeds from a contract with CNN, every vendor in the airport has (or can have) access to a cable feed, from which they are able to select any channel they wish (within reason, one presumes) to show their customers. That means bars, restaurants, news kiosks – all could be showing any channel at all on their televisions. Hoft and Co. over at PT have established it’s unlikely CNN aired such footage without it being available on their website today via search, so it seems correct that Longdon was not on CNN on April 25. But was Longdon perhaps on any other channels which may have been on in the Indianapolis airport?

The author then provides an embedded video of a local Indianapolis TV station covering the Moms Demand Action presser. (That station, WRTV, has graphics very similar to CNN's, as do other stations owned by the Scripps company.)

It sure gives Longdon slightly more credibility and shows how right wing media is full of shit, throwing around all sorts of marginal, circumstantial evidence to paint Longdon as a liar who wants to take away their precious, precious guns.

[Archae]

1. This is Jim Hoft.

"Dumbest guy on the Internet."

http://americanloons.blogspot.com/2013/10/769-jim-hoft.html

[friendly_iconoclast]

2. A FOIA request for the the airport surveillance videos...

...would put the matter to rest, one way or the other.