Did FreeMartyG And InfoWars Shame CNN Into Covering Actual News?

Stop the presses: CNN covered some actual news yesterday when it reported on the story of medical kidnapping victim Alyssa Gilderhus at the Mayo Clinic. But was it actually InfoWars and FreeMartyG which publicly shamed CNN into doing this real journalism? Que the Mission Impossible theme music for this one…

This mission, as we accepted it, began more than a year ago during the baby Charlie Gard medical kidnapping scandal in the UK and we thought that it had ended with an apparently unsuccessful April Fools' joke on CNN. But now we’re not so sure.

As many will recall, Charlie Gard was the infant who had a very rare form of the otherwise not-so-rare condition mitochondrial disease. His story went viral and made international news when the Great Ormond Street Hospital in England refused to let his parents discharge him and bring him elsewhere for experimental but potentially life-saving care:

And back then, the articles by Michelle Malkin and Rolling Stone about how I had helped save a mitochondrial disease patient named Justina Pelletier from a similar situation here in America at Harvard-affiliated Boston Children’s Hospital had just been published. So, with Pope Francis advocating against pulling the plug on Charlie and with President Trump tweeting to offer America’s help to treat him, we pitched CNN, which had been covering Charlie’s case in Great Britain, on a simple concept: what was happening to Charlie and his family in the United Kingdom also happens to families here in the United States.

But surprise, surprise, CNN and the reporter to whom we pitched, Susan Scutti, didn’t exactly get the story straight. Instead, she and CNN quoted ill-informed experts and used made up numbers, likely misleading the audience and downplaying the startling regularity of these incidents in America, the actual frequency of which is on full public display at the aptly-named news outlet MedicalKidnap.com.

FreeMartyG had to try to set the record straight and irresponsible journalism has always been a serious concern of ours. So, we published our actual emails with Scutti in this February article at InfoWars called “CNN Struck Again With Fake Story Hurting American Families.”

After publishing our exposé, we waited with bated breath. Would CNN update Scutti’s article? Would it print a retraction? That’s what responsible journalists would have done, but then again, responsible journalists probably wouldn’t have run Scutti’s article in the first place. Well, after a little bit, we seemed to have our answers to the above questions: no and no.

Flabbergasted anew, and with April Fools’ Day coming up as well as with CNN and the rest of the mainstream media in a seemingly perpetual Russia-frenzy, I had one more idea…

We created an email account for a fictitious Russian college student studying in America, and on April 1st, 2018, we sent the following email to CNN borrowing many of the details from the real-life medical kidnapping of Justina Pelletier in America, including the use of a court-issued gag order and even the actual name of Simona Bujoreanu, PhD:

Since Scutti and CNN seemingly didn’t want to believe that something like this could happen in America and since the parallels were strong to the type of corrupt nightmares that the network and its audience might expect to instead have happened to people in Putin’s Russia, if CNN had actually published anything, the April Fool’s joke would have been on them: surprise, this happened right here in America and instead of covering it, CNN published a fake news narrative saying it was a “one in a zillion chance.”

And when the folks at CNN thought that it was coming from Russia it seems like they were interested in covering it. Our fictitious Russian college student received the following reply from CNN:

Alas though, April Fools’ Day was over, so we decided not to continue the gag. Unlike Scutti and some others, we draw the line on fooling people at 11:59 pm April 1st.

But now in light of CNN’s medical kidnapping article yesterday, it seems like an open question as to whether our February exposé at InfoWars and/or our April Fools’ Day emails may have eventually had the effect for which we set out - getting CNN to help set the record straight on medical kidnappings in America. Regardless, it’s a good thing that the network now joins Fox, InfoWars, ABC, RT, Michelle Malkin, Rolling Stone, the Radio Television Digital News Association, the New American, the Huffington Post, the Daily Wire, Sirius/XM The Wilkow Majority, Red State, the Daily Caller, World Net Daily, and others in having reported on one or more of these harrowing real-life American experiences.

We do wish that in its coverage yesterday CNN had informed its audience on just how often this happens in America though. But, as the expression goes, “baby steps.”

Marty Gottesfeld is considered a prisoner of the Massachusetts Democratic establishment for helping to save the life of medical kidnapping victim Justina Pelletier when she was endangered by Harvard-affiliated Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH). To donate, learn more about him, or follow him on social media, go to www.FreeMartyG.com.