[Hoot Gibson]

"my original statement was a take away from a live broadcast on Fox, not an official press release that I doctored. My aside and the source from The Hill were not the same."


Now, that is not to say that you in your clinical bent to show me up, did not conflate my statement with the corroborating source, in the effort to try to make it seem that I had fabricated something.

I think that it is much more likely that you watched an interview of a coal miner while the new mining employment numbers crawled across the bottom of the screen and became confused.

I don't believe your claim Fox Business reported that 104,000 new coal mining jobs had been created since Trump took office. That would have been a tripling of the number of coal miners in this country. Even if somebody on Fox misreported the number of new coal mining jobs, anybody who lives in eastern Kentucky should have immediately known how ridiculous such a claim was.

There is something very disturbing when somebody refuses to admit their mistakes and then launches into a series of personal attacks when somebody else attempts to set the record straight. Instead of manning up, you chose to blame The Hill and now Fox Business News for your "mistake."

Trump has done about as much for the coal industry as anybody could have hoped for since he took office. He deserves a great deal of credit for keeping that promise. Nobody could have tripled the number of coal miners in this country in less than two years time.

Coal miner reacts to new mining jobs added under Trump (Fox Business 7 September, 2018)