The networks ignored Jennings' controversial record -- how he wrote about counseling a teenaged boy to use a condom before meeting an adult man in a bus stop restroom, and how his group the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) counseled high school students in dangerous sexual techniques like "fisting." But Saturday's NBC Nightly News publicized him in a Jeff Rossen story on bullying and the teen suicide of Phoebe Prince.
They promoted how Jennings and the Department of Education were pouring "hundreds of millions of dollars" into a federal anti-bullying campaign:
ROSSEN: In Springfield, Massachusetts, a young boy hanged himself last year after being teased about his size. In Ohio, Jessie Logan hanged herself after a nude photo was spread around her school. Experts say warning signs are often there.
BARBARA COLOROSO: They hang up from their phone and they're sad or sullen, they get off the Internet and they look a little frightened, these are all clues that you and I as parents need to be clued in to.
ROSSEN: And education officials are worried, too, worried bullying is causing a drop in the graduation rate. Now the federal government is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a new anti-bullying campaign.
KEVIN JENNINGS, U.S. Department of Education: What keeps me up at night, and everyone in the U.S. Department of Education, is the idea that out there there are children who'd rather die than go to school.
ROSSEN: The desperate choice that's left this Massachusetts town grieving.
Unidentified Woman: I hope people will get a lesson out of it.
ROSSEN: A lesson that came too late for Phoebe Prince.
Jennings' group GLSEN had a reading list that not only explicitly promoted homosexual activity, but explicitly boasted of sexual activities in grade school and sex between adults and children below the age of consent. How this man represents a "safe schools" agenda is a mystery.
