Originally posted Tuesday, September 18, 2018 by RODNEY HO/rho@ajc.com on his AJC Radio & TV Talk blog
Plenty of conservatives hate Atlanta-based CNN, fueled by President Donald Trump and his regular Tweets calling the network "fake news."
Seeking to prove their point, some right-wing meme creators found a photo of Anderson Cooper in waist-deep flood water, claiming he was exaggerating and staging shots during Hurricane Florence. (This was on the heels of Mike Seidel of the Weather Channel fighting off winds while two men walked calmly behind him.
But the photo was from 2008 during Hurricane Ike in Texas. And Cooper was demonstrating the dangers of shifting depths of flood waters.
Cooper himself on Monday night during his CNN show decided to address the issue in a nine-minute segment in part because Donald Trump Jr. used it as fodder to malign CNN on Twitter.
While many people on Twitter used the images and tied them to Florence, Trump Jr. merely implied that this was fakery and designed to make his dad “look bad.”
Cooper took umbrage to that, shading Trump Jr. by showing photos of him being an “outdoorsman” killing exotic wildlife but presuming he wasn’t in North Carolina helping in rescue efforts.
He then showed video of him in waist-deep water in Bridge City, Texas in a flooded area. He was demonstrating the various depths of water in a very small area. At one point, he even made fun of himself for doing this but he said he didn’t want to be on the dry part of the road interfering with rescue operations. He also wanted to show that water can go deep very quickly even just a few feet off a road and many people die in hurricanes via drowning.
He noted that his camera crew has to shoot on dry spots to keep the equipment from getting wet. And the tech person in the photo? He died last year, Cooper said.
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