ABC continued their fawning coverage of the teen gun control activists from Parkland, Florida on Good Morning America February 21. ABC correspondent and co-anchor for GMA’s weekend edition, Dan Harris, reported live from Tallahassee, where a busload of students from the site of last week’s school shooting had travelled to demand more gun control measures from the Florida state legislature. The entire ABC team eagerly touted the teens’ partisan message, while repeatedly characterizing critics to gun control as cruel online “trolls.”
Harris began his report sympathetically touting the teens “passion, pain and idealism,” that was facing “some hard legislative realities in this gun-friendly state.”
He immediately set the stage, pitting conservative lawmakers against the passionate teen activists.
“While on the road from Parkland to Tallahassee these young activists received some tough news. Florida legislators voted against even considering a ban on semiautomatic rifles, some Parkland students were in the gallery for the vote reacting with tears,” Harris said, before playing a clip of a student basically calling the GOP lawmakers future murderers.
Harris talked with several students, asking how it felt to know that lawmakers wouldn’t even consider their ban proposal. He followed that up by lamenting how “tough psychologically” it must be to face “criticism” for their political views after surviving a school shooting:
HARRIS As you know lawmakers voted against even considering a ban on semiautomatic rifles. What is your reaction to that.
HARRIS: Has it been tough on you guys psychologically to go from surviving one of the worst school shootings in American history to diving into what is really a tough political fight where you're taking some criticism?
As the media has done all week, any criticism directed at the teen’s highly partisan and highly emotionally charged message has been taken as a cruel attack against children, regardless of the fact that many are just months away from adulthood and have flat out called anyone who supports the Second Amendment, murderers.
Harris fed into the students’ partisan message, that banning guns would guarantee no more school shootings from here on out. He asked how “confident” the students were that their school would be “the last school to face a shooting.”
After students praised the support they’ve gotten for their movement from across the globe, Harris blasted the movement’s conservative critics:
“These kids are well aware, though, that they do have detractors among pro gun activists who call them tools of the liberal left but on the ground they received an enormous outpouring of support,” Harris gushed.
Stephanopoulos followed up on that by emphasizing how awful conservatives were being to the teens, lamenting how “sad” it was that these conservative “trolls” were “smearing them online.”
The ABC team went on to complain that Trump’s openness to measures that would allow trained teachers to be armed, was just “more guns in schools.”
Later on, anchor Robin Roberts prompted correspondent Adrienne Bankert to boast again about how these teens were "the most brilliant" "extremely intelligent" young people she's "ever met," as if the students’ intelligence was being called into question by critics instead of the actual, highly polarizing message they were promoting.
Read the full transcript below:
Good Morning America
2/21/2018
7:02:26AM- EST
HARRIS: Michael, good morning. Coming to you from a civic center in Tallahassee where the kids spent the night on cots, they’re eating breakfast behind me right now as you might be able to see. Soon, they’re going to walk over to the state capitol where they have a long series of meetings with everybody from the speaker of the house to the attorney general to the governor.
When you talk to these kids, their passion, their pain,their idealism, it's all palpable but it is already running head first into some hard legislative realities here in this gun-friendly state.
100 young people carrying sleeping bags and pillows as they boarded buses on an extraordinary lobbying mission. Just days after surviving one of America's worst school shootings. The first busload of parkland students have arrived and they're being greeted by a very large, enthusiastic and sympathetic crowd of local high school students.
STUDENT: We're fighting for our friends we lost and for the future of kids we're going to have.
HARRIS: While on the road from Parkland to Tallahassee these young activists received some tough news. Florida legislators voted against even considering a ban on semiautomatic rifles, some Parkland students were in the gallery for the vote reacting with tears.
STUDENT: The next death of someone with an assault rifle here in Florida is going to be on them!
HARRIS As you know today lawmakers voted against even considering a ban on semiautomatic rifles. What is your reaction to that?
STUDENT: It was a big punch in the gut because the -- it'll be a week tomorrow since this happened and already there's another roadblock in front of us.
STUDENT: This is something I think applies to everyone around the country. We don't -- we're not focusing on the students. We saw this happen at Pulse, Las Vegas, this has been an issue long present in our country.
HARRIS: Has it been tough on you guys psychologically to go from surviving one of the worst school shootings in American history to diving into what is really a tough political fight where you're taking some criticism?
STUDENT: It is a way of grieving I guess and I'm doing it for the two friends that I lost because I know this is what they would have wanted.
STUDENT: We experienced it firsthand. We were the ones who were locked in closets for hours not knowing if we our friends or if we were going to be okay like maybe we're not necessarily experts on the politics side but we definitely know the impact it can have on anyone's life.
STUDENT: We're just still waiting to wake up. I know for me this is the way that we're grieving.
HARRIS: How confident are you really that your school will be the last shooting?
STUDENT: We have an energy that's far from being over. We're going to keep fighting.
STUDENT: We have the whole world backing us and supporting us.
HARRIS: These kids are well aware, though, that they do have detractors among pro gun activists who call them tools of the liberal left however here on the ground in Florida they received an enormous outpouring of support. For example, when they arrived here at the civic center and went to their cots to go to bed they found on those cots goody bags filled with snacks and homemade cards and notes from local teachers and students. Michael.
STRAHAN: And, Dan, it's possible that Florida might step in on a state level if Congress doesn't step up but has change on a state level worked in something like this in the past?
HARRIS: So, this is tricky and a little bit controversial any time you talk about gun control legislation but it appears from the numbers that states with tougher gun laws do have lower levels of gun violence, for example, in Connecticut after Sandy Hook they passed some tough, new laws and gun violence did go down. Critics say, though, that may be because the overall crime rate went down.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Dan, I guess the sad commentary on the state of our politics today but these students we've seen all over the last week now getting smeared online.
HARRIS: Yeah, so these kids are well aware of the trolling that has been directed toward them. And some darker corners of the internet there are charges that these kids are actually actors or “crisis actors.” These kids deny that. They're not super defensive about it and think it's absurd and even their Senator Marco Rubio came forward to say that this claim is flatly false. Overall when the kids look at their social media feeds which they do quite frequently they see an outpouring of support which gladdens them.
