ABC News appears to have simply copy and pasted a given “title” to the group Alliance Defending Freedom from the far-left group Southern Poverty Law Center without checking into the group further. Essentially, again without checking, ABC publicly called ADF a hate group and now… they’re demanding an apology.
As written for CNSNews.com by Theresa Smith:
The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), wants ABC News to apologize for and retract an item calling it a “hate group,” the group’s legal counsel Kerri Kupec said Friday.
On July 12, the network posted a story with a headline saying Attorney General Jeff Sessions had addressed an “anti-LGBT hate group,” in reference to a designation bestowed on the ADF by the left-wing advocacy group Southern Poverty Law Center in 2016.
On Fox’ “Fox and Friends” on Friday, presenter Steve Doocy said it was one thing for the SPLC – “which you say has an agenda and they are to the left” – to call the ADF a hate group, “but for ABC news then to just cut and paste their headline, put it on their website, that’s where you got a problem.”
“Have you heard from ABC yet?” he asked Kupec. “And I know you want an apology.”
“We would like an apology,” she replied. “We would like them to retract the story.”
The ABC’s first story noted that the Department of Justice had refused to reveal what Sessions had told the group the Summit on Religious Liberty in Dana Point, California.
Sessions subsequently released the text of his address to the Federalist.
In a follow-up story, reporting that Sessions had released his speech. ABC restated that the ADF had been “designated an ‘anti-LGBT hate group’ by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2016.”
Kupac, who is also the ADF’s communications director, also had sharp criticism for the SPLC.
“Southern Poverty Law Center is an organization that attacks veterans, nuns, Muslims who are fighting Islamic terrorists. They attack Christians, Catholics, it doesn’t matter. And yet ABC took it upon themselves to cut and paste language from this violence-inciting organization and put it into their headline as fact,” she said.
Religious Freedom Group Wants ABC Apology for Cutting and Pasting Left-Wing Group’s ‘Smear’