The Associated Press issued a statement about its widely panned photo of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, with a background picture of a handgun pointed straight at his head, saying the shot was accidental, according to WND.
“Presidential candidate Ted Cruz was shown in a series of 14 photos taken by an Associated Press photographer at a ‘Celebrate the 2nd Amendment’ event Saturday afternoon, held at a shooting range in Johnston, Iowa,” said Paul Colford, vice president and director of media relations said, according to Politico. “Five of the photos published by AP included images of guns seen on a wall in the background so that it appeared a pistol was pointed at Sen. Cruz’s head.”
Colford didn’t exactly apologize for the photos, however. “The images were not intended to portray Sen. Cruz in a negative light,” he said.
Conservatives and social-media posters were outraged.
“The AP is lying,” declared Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center:
“This was not an accident. They made a deliberate decision to publish the photo. The AP owes Senator Cruz, his wife Heidi, and his children an immediate and unqualified apology. Furthermore, I am calling on the AP to conduct a complete investigation of everyone involved in the publishing of the photo and to fire those who ultimately made the decision to publish the photo.”Bozell added: “This is disgusting. Just days after a horrific shooting that took nine lives, the AP has the gall to unapologetically display a gun aimed at the head of a presidential candidate. They would never do this to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Nor should they.”
As Breitbart pointed out, for example, if the subject in the photo had been a Democrat at an anti-gun rally, would this picture have seen the light of day?
The photograph of Cruz with the handgun poster in the background was taken by the AP’s Charlie Neibergall.
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