The battle over censorship at WOOD-TV Channel 8 continues. Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association of Michigan, put out a press release late Thursday afternoon accusing the Grand Rapids NBC affiliate of colluding with gay rights activists to cancel the family groups’ controversial hour-long paid infomercial called “Speechless: Silencing the Christians.” 

Glenn’s proof? Trevor Thomas, the deputy communications director for the Human Rights Campaign in Washington D.C., once worked for WOOD-TV 8’s newsroom. HRC is a large gay rights advocacy group.

From Glenn’s press release:

“Now, however, we learn that a public spokesman for the so-called Human Rights Campaign — the national homosexual activist group that claimed credit for pressuring your station to censor and breach its agreement to air AFA’s paid documentary — is a former long-time WOOD-TV newsroom executive who while holding that position was allowed by the station to actively and publicly campaign against the Marriage Protection Amendment approved by Michigan voters in 2004,” Glenn wrote.

“That new information leads us to question whether the real story is that WOOD-TV management was unduly influenced by or even acted in collusion with a former high-level staffer who you allowed to openly campaign for homosexual activists’ political agenda while with the station and who now promotes that agenda full-time nationwide,” Glenn wrote. “The broader question raised by that relationship and your censorship of AFA’s pro-family documentary is whether viewers can trust WOOD-TV to be a fair and impartial source of news regarding the homosexual agenda.”

Thomas worked for the news station for several years, as a producer in the newsroom. Two television station professional, one who has been a news director and executive producer and one who is currently an assistant news director, scoffed at the idea of perceiving a news room producer as either an “executive” or a “high level staffer.”

Thomas himself, reached by phone in his Washington D.C. office declined to comment on the allegations of collusion. He did say he considered his continuing involvement with west Michigan gay groups “a badge of honor.”