State’s Top Paper Exposes Deception
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory headlined a luncheon of a group of business and civic leaders last week and was only too happy to take questions from the audience. Except the questions weren’t from the audience, they were pre-written by the governor’s staff.Â
“Anything you like. No filter here,†the governor, in a heated and close re-election race, told the Hood Hargett Breakfast Club audience who had gathered at Charlotte’s SouthPark.
A moderator picked from the audience read pre-submitted questions from a sheet given him by the governor’s office. After three questions that supposedly were from The Charlotte Observer had been asked and answered, an actual Charlotte Observer journalist was denied a question.
“We’ve got three Observer questions answered already. I think you guys dominate the news enough,†McCrory said, as The Charlotte Observer’s Taylor Batten, who the governor had turned away, reports.
“When I tried to ask McCrory a question, the filter went up,” Batten writes in an opinion piece this weekend.Â
What kinds of questions was McCrory only too happy to respond to?
“They were softballs from his staff about what he wanted to do with his next term; how he wanted to reduce the state’s rape kit backlog; and how the state crime lab performed under McCrory’s opponent, Roy Cooper.”
“When the event was over, McCrory did not meet with the throng of reporters who were there. He ducked out a side door and down a hall that led to a back exit. I followed him to try to ask him about HB2, but his staff blocked me,” Batten writes. “Ricky Diaz, a campaign spokesman, on Friday acknowledged the campaign provided questions for the governor, but said ‘we were asked to in order to keep the conversation format going.’â€
That, of course, is false, according to the executive director of the Hood Hargett Breakfast Club.Â
“She said she had expected the governor to take live questions from the audience but the campaign insisted on this other format and wanted to include questions of their own along with ones from the audience,” the Observer reports. “All the questions were portrayed as coming from the audience and the Observer, and the crowd was never told that many of them actually came from McCrory’s campaign.”
So McCrory apparently created the ruse to avoid questions about HB2, which has cost his state hundreds of millions of dollars.Â
Above, a short clip of remarks McCrory did make about HB2. That alone would have been stunning news, this just adds fuel to the fire.
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Image: Screenshot via The Charlotte Observer
Hat tip: Towleroad