Conspiracy theorist and radio talk show host Alex Jones was forced to publicly apologize to Chobani on May 17 for a fake news story that linked the company to a 2014 sexual assault in Twin Falls, Idaho, where Chobani has a yogurt plant.
Jones and his far-right website Infowars a month ago posted the fake news story, which was headlined “Idaho Yogurt Maker Caught Importing Migrant Rapists” when it was tweeted by Infowars to its hundreds of thousands of followers, according to Huffington Post. Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya, himself a Turkish immigrant, has been very vocal about hiring immigrants and refugees to work at the company, especially for the huge, greenfield plant it built in Twin Falls. “If a refugee has a job, they are no longer a refugee,” he said on CBS' "60 Minutes" in early April.
Jones, an extreme right wing conservative, accused the company of bringing “crime and tuberculosis to the community,” according to Chobani lawyers quoted by Huffington Post. Chobani and Ulukaya sued for defamation.
After settling the suit, Jones said on the air: "During the week of April 10, 2017, certain statements were made on the Infowars Twitter feed and YouTube channel regarding Chobani LLC that I now understand to be wrong. The tweets and video have now been retracted and will not be re-posted. On behalf of Infowars, I regret that we mischaracterized Chobani, its employees and the people of Twin Falls, Idaho, the way we did.”
Jones is a serial apologist. Earlier, he and/or Inforwars acknowledged fault for furthering the fake news story, circulating before the presidential election, that top Democratic officials were involved with a satanic child pornography ring operated out of a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. (In December, a North Carolina man shot up the restaurant, thinking the story was real.) And Jones apologized to actor Alec Baldwin for threatening to break the actor's back for his President Trump impersonations on Saturday Night Live.
So why are we reporting this junk? Our apologies.
