From Joe Miller’s campaign:
Transcript of the call (audio here):
[Laughter] [INAUDIBLE]
FEMALE REPORTER: Child molesters…
MALE REPORTER: Oh yeah… can you repeat Joe Miller’s…uh… list of people, campaign workers, which one’s the molester? [INAUDIBLE]
FEMALE VOICE: We know that out of all the people that will show up tonight, at least one of them will be a registered sex offender.
[Laughter] MALE REPORTER: You have to find that one person…
FEMALE REPORTER: And the one thing we can do is ….we won’t know….we won’t know but if there is any sort of chaos whatsoever we can put out a twitter/facebook alert: saying what the… ‘Hey Joe Miller punched at rally.’
FEMALE REPORTER: Kinda like Rand Paul…I like that. [Laughter]
FEMALE REPORTER: That’s a good one.
The CBS affiliate says in a statement to Politico:
The perception that this garbled, out of context recording may leave is unfortunate, but to allege that our staff was discussing or planning to create or fabricate stories regarding candidate Miller is absurd. The complete conversation was about what others might be able to do to cause disruption within the Miller campaign, not what KTVA could do.
If you read the whole transcript, the KTVA reporters discuss the hypothetical scenario of reporting on Joe Miller getting punched at a rally. That indeed appears to be a discussion of what “others might be able to do to cause disruption.”
But the reporters were also apparently talking about actively trying to find a child molester at a Joe Miller rally:
[Laughter] MALE REPORTER: You have to find that one person…
Perhaps they were just making some sort of sick joke, but those remarks do not appear to be a discussion of a “what-if” scenario. KTVA’s statement leaves questions unanswered.
