Liberal journalists are fond of assailing conservatives as a bunch of birthers and conspiracy kooks, but don't seem to have a problem with hiring individuals who embrace the belief that the United States government had something to do with the September 11th, 2001 terror attacks. Huffington Post editor Arianna Huffington announced on Wednesday that 9/11 truther Donte Stallworth has been hired to cover national security.
In 2009, Stallworth tweeted, "NO WAY 9/11 was carried out by 'dying' Bin Laden, 19 men who couldn't fly a damn kite. STILL have NO EVIDENCE Osama was connected, like Iraq." The former NFL player, who pled guilty [1] to a DUI manslaughter in 2009, is also an anti-vaccine truther [2] and has fretted about the danger of getting flu shots.
As reported by Gawker [3], Stallworth is now insisting that he no longer supports 9/11 theories: "Just to be clear, I no longer feel the way I did in that tweet 5 years ago." He added:
"After a lot of reading and researching on it, my views changed... and that's ok."
"Credit goes to James Bamford, whose great book disabused me of that stuff and showed what a disastrous intelligence failure 9/11 was."
Yet, as Politico [4]points out, his last truther tweet was nine months ago. Not five years. (See tweets here [3].)
On September 5, 2013, Huffington Post Washington bureau chief Ryan Grim [5] appeared on the Martin Bashir show and derided the hold birtherism has within the Republican Party.
RYAN GRIM: This is kind of what you get when you have representative democracy tilted by gerrymandering. Because there are, you know, millions of people out there who don't think the President is legitimate, think that he was born in Africa or Asia or somewhere or wherever he was born. They're certain that there's just no certain that there's just no way this guy can actually be our president. And lo and behold, they have some representation in the House.
Clearly, conspiracy theories now have "some representation" at the Huffington Post.
MSNBC execs hired 9/11 truther Toure [6] for their afternoon show, The Cycle.
ABC, the home of World News and Nightline, has also embraced conspiracy thinking. The network hired 9/11 truther Rosie O'Donnell [7] (twice) for The View. ABC also hired anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Jenny McCarthy [8] for the same show.
— Scott Whitlock is Senior News Analyst at the Media Research Center. Follow Scott Whitlock on Twitter. [9]