WBBM-TV, the CBS affiliate in Chicago, has come under fire in recent days for broadcasting an interview with a four-year-old boy, and deliberately taking his quote out of context to completely pervert its meaning.
The story aired on June 30, as part of a package about overnight violence around the city.
"Kids on the street as young as four were there to see it all unfold, and had disturbing reactions," then-anchor Steve Bartelstein said, leading into video of an interview with the four-year-old boy.
When asked, "What are you going to do when you get older?" the boy responds: “I’m going to have me a gun!”
"That is very scary indeed," Bartelstein adds.
- Reporter: “Boy, you ain’t scared of nothing! Damn! When you get older are you going to stay away from all these guns?”
Boy: “No.”
Reporter: “No? What are you going to do when you get older?”
Boy: “I’m going to have me a gun!”
Reporter” “You are! Why do you want to do that?”
Boy: “I'm going to be the police!” (emphasis added)
And as police officers, we should be doubly insulted. A four-year-old recognizes the police officer as someone who stops the mayhem, who defends the wounded, who cleans up the mess left behind by gunfire in his own community - and he aspires to be one of us for however brief a moment - and then CBS uses him as a prop. A prop to advance more than a few agendas by direct manipulation and by omission.
Where's Mary Mitchell and her bleating "respect" now? Where's the extortionist Jesse and his demands for accountability now? You have a media conglomerate broadcasting and reinforcing a stereotype they claim is held only by the police and benighted racist Republicans trying to return to the pre-Civil Rights days, yet all we hear are crickets? We give Mary, Jesse and their ilk a lot of grief (and rightly so) over their anti-police agenda because it's poorly thought out and based on so much fantasy, exaggeration and imagined victim-hood. Here's a root cause of it all, but since CBS is part of the liberal media elite, they're blind, deaf and stupid.