SandyMaloneSunrise, FL – A survivor of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School has revealed the name of the CNN producer who tried to get him to ask a scripted question during a CNN Town Hall on Wednesday night.
“What had happened was four days ago I had gotten contacted by a lady named Carrie Stevenson from CNN,” Colton Haab, a 17-year-old member of the Junior Reserve Officer’s Training Corp (ROTC) at the Parkland high school, told Tucker Carlson of FOX News in an interview Thursday night.
Haab heroically used a Kevlar sheet to protect his classmates during the shooting rampage.
“She had asked me originally to just write a speech, it was going to be at the town hall at the BB&T Center, so I agreed. I felt like it would be the right thing to do, to be able to go to speak my part, as well as open eyes to a few things that I thought that could make this situation a little bit better,” he said.
But eventually, Haab declined to participate in the network’s event, held in Sunrise one week after the tragic school shooting that left 17 students and faculty dead.
He said he declined the invitation because CNN had taken the questions he submitted, and rewritten it into one question that he was told to ask.
“They had taken what I had wrote and what I had briefed on and talked about, and they actually wrote the question for me,” Haab explained.
He told FOX News that CNN did not use his words in the question.
Stevenson contacted Haab a few hours before the event and they had already written the question out for him, he said.
Haab told FOX News that CNN’s Stevenson told him that he had to “stick to the script.”
CNN attacked the young hero on Twitter on Thursday morning, portraying the future military officer, who risked his life to save other students, as a liar.
They posted a message that said CNN has never ever provided scripted questions for its Town Hall meetings.
But Haab wasn’t the only one who called out the notoriously liberal news network for trying to stack the deck at their Town Hall.
Andrew Klein, whose daughter Ariana was a survivor of the horrible attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, told FOX News that CNN was handpicking their interviews with an agenda.
“I actually spoke to a CNN producer on Thursday, the day after the shooting, and the producer insinuated to me that they were looking for people who were willing to espouse a certain narrative, which was taking the tragedy and turning it into policy debate,” Klein said.
“And I read as being a gun control debate,” he said.
President Donald Trump let loose on Twitter, blasting CNN’s disparagement of the heroic teenager, calling it “fake news.” The network quickly tweeted back that they could “prove” there was no truth to his story.
But thus far, no one has explained why almost all of the students who asked questions during the CNN’s Town Hall on Feb. 21 were reading their questions off of almost identical little slips of paper.
“From what I did see, I had seen a couple people that had asked questions … and it was a little piece of paper cut out. And I know for a fact that nobody cut their own paper out and wrote their own question especially when they were all based off the same topic.”
“Honestly, it was very shocking to me, because we had just went through such a horrific tragedy for them to take that and then make such a big newscast over what they want to hear. It was very upsetting to me,” Haab said.