HLN blurred out the pro-Donald Trump T-shirt in a re-airing of an interview yesterday with hero Steve Eckel, the retired cop who rescued a four-month-old baby girl from a hot car.
The before and after videos are embedded below so that you can draw your own conclusions.
“HLN had Eckel on to get his story about the rescue, but apparently was not interested in getting all of his free speech,” Independent Journal Review claimed.
After he and another passerby, Sara Mazzone, called 911, the good Samaritan used a sledgehammer from his car to break through a window and save the screaming infant from the approximately 90-degree heat in the locked vehicle in the parking lot of a Howell, New Jersey, shopping center.
It is alleged that the baby was left in the car for about 40 minutes.
As the Inquisitr previously reported, once they had the infant safely out of the car, Eckel and Mazzone removed her sweat-soaked clothes. They took the baby inside the store where it was cool. Mazzone grabbed a shirt and moistened it so they could soothe the child with cool water and manage her body temperature until cops and paramedics arrived.
“There’s no doubt in my mind the baby would be dead if we didn’t do what we did,” the former sergeant with the Middlesex County Sheriff’s Office and father of six told the New York Daily News.
Responding officers charged the mom who allegedly left the baby in the hot car with child endangerment.
Eckel, 53, appeared on CNN sister TV network HLN yesterday in a three-minute-plus live interview to discuss what happened in the Monday hot car incident while wearing a blue “Trump for President” T-shirt. As sharp-eyed social media users noticed, when HLN rebroadcast the interview, the wording on his shirt was blurred out.
CNN media correspondent Brian Stelter issued a tweet this afternoon in which HLN acknowledged that it made a mistake in blurring out the logo on Eckel’s shirt. The same spokesperson reportedly told the Washington Free Beacon “that the blurring was not common practice for non-political interviews.”
This blurred T-shirt message would probably not be viewed as particularly significant except for one thing: It is the height of election season and Trump supporters, along with non-supporters such as prominent progressive journalist Glenn Greenwald of Edward Snowden fame and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, have accused the U.S. mainstream media of essentially engaging in a full-court press to elect Democrat Hillary Clinton president over Republican Donald Trump.
Against this backdrop, shortly after expressing grave concerns during a Los Angeles radio interview about Hillary Clinton’s health and what he considered primitive healthcare treatment she was receiving, Dr. Drew Pinsky, the ubiquitous TV physician and board-certified internist, lost his gig on CNN sister network HLN after five years. According to what an insider told The Wrap, HLN had supposedly decided to cancel his show as part of its ongoing rebranding efforts well before Pinsky’s controversial radio comments, however. Dr. Drew’s last show on HLN will air on September 22.
On Sunday night, Donald Trump tweeted that he would be willing to release detailed medical records if, in his words, “Crooked Hillary,” his nickname for his rival, would do the same. In putting the tweet up on the screen, CNN deleted the word “Crooked.” According to The Hill, “a CNN spokesperson told The Hill that ‘the tweet should have been shown in its entirety.'”
Both CNN and HLN are owned by Turner Broadcasting System, a division of Time Warner.
CNN recently had to modify a Donald Trump-related headline on its website after social media backlash, the Inquisitr previously explained. In a story about Trump’s outreach to black voters, the cable network seemed to imply that African-Americans and felons are one and the same.
“The only question someone needs to ask: Would CNN or HLN have done this if a guest was wearing a pro-Hillary T-shirt?,” IJR wondered about the blurring of hero Steve Eckel’s Trump-supporting apparel.
Added: Steve Eckel told the Washington Post that HLN has not apologized to him directly and that “I don’t know how they call it an error…I think everybody’s horrified by it…I haven’t found one [news organization] that’s completely down the middle. I just can’t believe the media goes to this length to be one-sided.”
[Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images]