Cher certainly wasn’t alone today in wishing for something to happen to Florida Pastor Terry Jones in the aftermath of yesterday’s violence in Libya, which killed four Americans. To her credit, Cher did stop short of calling for Jones to be arrested or even killed, but she did revive a false story that Jones had been arrested for possession of child pornography.
A quick Internet search will turn up plenty of stories from August 2010 linking Jones to a child porn bust in Florida, but all seem to originate from user-submitted news site Topix, where a user seems to have combined two separate and unrelated stories, one regarding Jones. Another plausible theory is that an automated news aggregator at NBC picked up and distributed the story (which has since been scrubbed from NBC’s site).
While there’s no evidence to support Cher’s story, there’s no question that those truly responsible for the deaths of four Americans are to found in Libya, not Florida.
