CNN has been given a Cronkite Award (“winners prove facts matter”) for their anti-gun, NRA-bashing 105 minutes of hate televised town hall event after the Parkland shooting. That achievement is right up with there with prestigious honors bestowed on other luminaries such as Walter Duranty, Rigoberta Menchu and Yasser Arafat.
Dana Loesch, who was one of the punching bags on the stage that night, has this to say . . .
I hadn’t gone to argue with anyone, I was simply there to be a voice for millions of people who choose to associate as NRA members, many of whom were watching the CNN event with their own children at home. We are just as concerned with school security, which is why we support NRA’s School Shield program to improve security and training within schools across the country, free of charge. Our support for Second Amendment rights doesn’t make us complicit in crimes we didn’t commit nor responsible for failing to prevent these crimes — not any more than Scott Israel and Robert Runcie, who had years’ worth of advance knowledge and tips that we did not.
In the days following the event, CNN allowed to air unchallenged accusation that I owned Congress, that gun owners are monsters, that any lawmaker who supports the Second Amendment is complicit in mass murder.
That CNN celebrates winning an award for this event demonstrates that the network cannot distinguish between political activism and reporting. At best, its event was network-organized tragedy voyeurism, a selfish intrusion into a community’s fresh, days-old pain, with the purpose of settling political scores and dividing the country instead of fostering genuine discussion on solutions and practical means of school security. If anyone should have won an award, it should be the local media in Florida, particularly the reporters at the Sun-Sentinel, the Fort Lauderdale daily newspaper whose original, dedicated focus on the truth exposed much of what we now know about the missed warnings leading up to the massacre and the corruption of the school board. (The board even threatened legal action against reporters for accurate reporting.)
CNN should give its award to the Sun-Sentinel — and to everyone else, an apology.
– Dana Loesh in CNN’s Parkland Townhall Sought to Inflame, Not Inform