“CNN's decision to show video of Iraqi insurgent snipers targeting U.S. troops,” FNC's Brit Hume relayed in his Wednesday “Grapevine” segment, “has gotten it kicked out of one Midwestern hotel chain.” Hume reported how James Thompson, owner of the Stoney Creek Inns in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri and Wisconsin, “has dropped CNN and Headline News from the cable lineup in his ten hotels” because “he made a quote, 'judgment of conscience' after seeing the sniper video, which he calls an 'obscenity' that was quote, 'personally offensive and shocking.' He says his company 'will not be a party to propaganda for terrorists.'"
Tim Graham's October 24 NewsBusters item on Congressman Duncan Hunter scolding CNN for airing the video from the point of view of snipers shooting U.S. soldiers and Marines. MRC President Brent Bozell's October 25 column: “CNN, Stenographer to Terror.”
Hume's item in full on the November 8 Special Report with Brit Hume:
CNN’s decision to show video of Iraqi insurgent snipers targeting U.S. troops has gotten it kicked out of one Midwestern hotel chain. James Thompson -- who owns Stoney Creek Hospitality Corporation -- has dropped CNN and Headline News from the cable lineup in his ten hotels in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri and Wisconsin. Thompson tells Fox News he made a quote, 'judgment of conscience' after seeing the sniper video, which he calls an 'obscenity' that was quote, 'personally offensive and shocking.' He says his company 'will not be a party to propaganda for terrorists.'”
A Wednesday news story in Wisconsin's Wausau Daily Herald, “Inn owner: Decision to pull CNN based solely on terrorist tape,” began:
The owner the Stoney Creek Inn in Rothschild said today that his decision to pull the cable news channel CNN from the inn’s guest rooms was based solely on the network’s airing of a terrorist propaganda tape.
James Thompson, president of the Des Moines, Iowa-based Stoney Creek Hospitality Corp., said the move was not meant as a political statement regarding coverage of the war in Iraq or as a protest of CNN in general. Rather, he said, it was his personal stance against the network’s apparent willingness to support terrorists by broadcasting footage of U.S. soldiers being assassinated in Iraq.
“I am repulsed by that judgment, and I made a decision of conscience for myself,” said Thompson, whose company operates 10 hotels in the Midwest. “There comes a time when you either stay silent or speak out, and this was wrong.”
