Current TV anchor David Shuster broke the news detailing what happened when two Republican National Convention attendees assaulted a CNN camerawoman, screaming racial obscenities and throwing peanuts at her.
STORY: Just Disgusting! Black CNN Camerawoman Had Peanuts Thrown At Her During RNC
In his tweet, Shuster wrote: “GOP attendee ejected for throwing nuts at African American CNN camera woman + saying ‘This is how we feed animals.'”
We had a chance to speak with Shuster about the unfortunate incident and he gave us a rundown as to what happened during the RNC. Here’s what he told us:
“The background of this, is that I used to work at CNN for many years and I know a lot of their technical staff, crew staff and all sorts of people. I heard from one of our own people about the incident with the CNN camerawoman.
We were told that an African American woman, who was working either on or near the floor, had been taunted by one, maybe two, convention attendees.
It was unclear whether they were delegates or alternates, but the African American camerawoman had been taunted and then at some point they had thrown peanut shells at her and then one of them said, or both of them said, ‘This is how we feed the animals.’
At this point, it was told to me that the CNN crew complained, security came over, everyone immediately identified who these people were and security, as well as the RNC officials, threw them out of the convention.”
Do you know the woman’s name by any chance?
I do not and CNN doesn’t want to give it out, because there are some people over at CNN who were initially asked not to talk about this.
CNN made the decision that they did not want to talk about this last night. And I think if we did not get on the story, it wouldn’t have gotten out.
And it was given to us by some CNN folks who felt it was a shame that CNN wasn’t reporting on it.
As far as CNN is concerned, are they done with it?
I think CNN took the same view that we took last night on Current. It was 8:30, 9 o’clock when we got there, so they were heavy into the speeches. All of us were convinced that this was not representative of everybody at the convention and I think there were still some details to be flushed out.
So, for CNN and Current for that matter, we didn’t put it on the air.
I just sent out the tweet, hoping that other reporters might be able to get it up.
CNN did confirm that the incident happened and released a statement:
“CNN can confirm there was an incident directed at an employee inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum earlier this afternoon. CNN worked with convention officials to address this matter and will have no further comment.”
As for now, CNN will not release the camerawoman’s name and considers the matter closed.
