Morgan Freeman on Connecticut Shooting: Hoax Statement by Canadian, Not Actor
Morgan Freeman has denied making a rant-like statement on the Newtown, Connecticut shooting that has gone viral on the internet. The hoax statement originally attributed to actor Freeman was actually written by a Canadian guy named Mark, who admitted it on his Facebook page.
In the hoax statement, Freeman was falsely reported as blaming "sensationalist media" for the massacre that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut on Friday. The comments attributed to the actor went viral Sunday, being shared more than 1 million times on Facebook.
But it was fake since Freeman was not the author. His publicist Stan Rosenfield told TheWrap on Sunday that the actor never made or posted any statement in regards to the Connecticut school shooting. He said that Freeman's camp are trying to figure out how the hoax statement started.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
According to Reddit users, the Freeman statement is identical to a Facebook post by a man named "Mark" from Vancouver.
Reddit user Quintilian751 claims that the Reddit thread post began as a joke among friends to try to make Mark's Facebook post go viral. He included a screenshot of Mark's original post on Facebook.
Commenting on his own Facebook post, Mark wrote "If I know the Internet, someone will attribute the quote to Morgan Freeman or Betty White and it'll go viral."
Mark later added: "OH GOD IT'S ALREADY HAPPENING."
The original hoax statement that was wrongly attributed to Morgan Freeman read:
"You want to know why. This may sound cynical, but here's why.
It's because of the way the media reports it. Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single victim of Columbine? Disturbed people who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see the news and want to top it by doing something worse, and going out in a memorable way. Why a grade school? Why children? Because he'll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.
CNN's article says that if the body count "holds up", this will rank as the second deadliest shooting behind Virginia Tech, as if statistics somehow make one shooting worse than another. Then they post a video interview of third-graders for all the details of what they saw and heard while the shootings were happening. Fox News has plastered the killer's face on all their reports for hours. Any articles or news stories yet that focus on the victims and ignore the killer's identity? None that I've seen yet. Because they don't sell. So congratulations, sensationalist media, you've just lit the fire for someone to top this and knock off a day care center or a maternity ward next.
You can help by forgetting you ever read this man's name, and remembering the name of at least one victim. You can help by donating to mental health research instead of pointing to gun control as the problem. You can help by turning off the news."
