By Jim Geraghty
Friday, May 04, 2018
Dallas, Texas —
A video shown twice before the main speeches at the NRA’s annual meeting mocked
CNN’s “this is an apple” commercial.
“This is a lemon,” the announcer declared. (It is
unlikely that it is a coincidence that the choice of produce is the surname of
a CNN anchor.) “Yes, some people might try to tell you that this is a
journalist. They might even scream ‘journalist,’ ‘journalist,’ ‘journalist,’
over and over again. They might put journalists in all-caps . . . but this is a
lemon.” The joke worked on three levels, and the gathered gun owners chuckled
throughout. In a subsequent video, NRATV host and former U.S. Secret Service
agent Dan Bongino silently made lemonade out of some lemons, generating another
round of laughter. “When they give you lemons, we give you the truth,” the
video promises.
It’s unsurprising that the national news media would be a
frequent and favorite target of the speakers at the NRA’s annual meeting —
particularly the regular critics of media such as Chris Cox, Wayne LaPierre,
and Donald Trump. But even the comparatively buttoned-down Vice President Mike
Pence spoke at length about his objections to the mass media’s coverage of
firearms and those who own them.
“The media are working an agenda that is very different
from most of us in this room,” Pence said. “They won’t tell the whole story of
firearms in America. They focus on the tragedies and heartbreak — and well they
should — but many in the national media ignore when well-trained, law-abiding
gun owners save lives. It’s the truth.” Pence spoke of armed citizens who
intervened and prevented tragedies at an Atlanta party, a Philadelphia barber
shop, and on a Chicago street.
“I’m calling on the national media to start telling the
whole story to the American people about firearms,” Pence said to applause.
“It’s time the national media gave as much attention to our heroes as much as
they give to our villains.”
Criticism of the media has always been a theme of the
speeches at the NRA’s gathering, but this year felt like it could easily have
been co-produced by L. Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center.
Even by the standards of the never-smooth relationship
between the NRA and the national media, the past few months have left gun
owners enraged about how frequently and casually they’re villainized, and how
openly gun-control advocates have been exalted. Much of this change in the
media’s coverage of gun rights stemmed from the emergence of pro-gun-control
students who survived the Parkland shooting.
CNN was always a favorite target of speakers at NRA
events, but its recent coverage added fuel to the fire. The prime-time “town
hall meeting” CNN put on just days after the shooting represented a
particularly embarrassing hour for the network, in which the furious
demonization of NRATV Dana Loesch went unchecked while Broward County Sheriff
Scott Israel — whose department handled the situation about as badly as is
imaginable — was given the stage to lecture Loesch: “You are not standing up
for [these students] until you say, ‘I want less weapons.’” It was shameless
and deft responsibility-shifting on the sheriff’s part, and CNN let it go
unchallenged. (After several days, in perhaps the journalistic equivalent of a
referee’s make-up call, CNN subjected Israel to more critical coverage and much
tougher interviews.)
The emergence of the Parkland students provided the
national media with what was ostensibly an emotional human-interest story — here’s a young student who’s endured a
terrifying event, listen to how that experience affected him — and it
quickly turned into an opportunity for scathing, often unfair criticisms of gun
owners and the NRA. David Hogg quickly became a go-to source for comments that
programs, magazines, and newspapers would never print or broadcast in other
contexts. In one particularly angry interview, Hogg called the NRA, “pathetic
f***ers that want to keep killing our children,” and claimed GOP lawmakers
“could have blood from children splattered all over their faces and they
wouldn’t take action, because they all still see these dollar signs.”
For better or worse, CNN’s media reporter, Brian Stelter,
admitted in a late March interview with S. E. Cupp that he simply couldn’t
bring himself to correct David Hogg when he appeared on Stelter’s program.
“There were a few times I wanted to jump in and say,
‘Let’s correct that fact.’ And at one of the times I did and other times I did
not,” Stelter said. “There’s always that balance, how many times you’re going
to interrupt.”
Almost every speaker at the convention mentioned longtime
NRA member Stephen Willeford, who exchanged fire with a mass shooter outside
the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and helped chase him
down in November 2017. NRA members fairly ask why they’re considered morally
culpable for the horrific actions of mass shooters, but the virtues of heroic
NRA members are not worthy of comparable discussion.
For the NRA and many of its members, no real conversation
about our gun laws can begin until the national media acknowledge that their
past coverage has been one-sided and they begin to paint a more accurate
picture of America’s gun owners. The NRA enjoyed a lot of legislative successes
in the past decade or so, but perhaps the organization wonders how secure those
legislative or political victories are in a media environment like the current
one. The media largely shrugged at Connecticut governor Dannel Malloy
repeatedly insisting that the NRA has “in essence become a terrorist
organization,” and Newsweek thought
the most newsworthy angle about a defaced billboard declaring “kill the NRA” is
that “the gun lobby is freaking out about it.”
Comments
For all of the glowing coverage of the Parkland students,
and the bold declarations that they “changed the gun debate,” there’s some
evidence that their arguments had little lasting impact:
In the more than two months since
that shooting, HuffPost and YouGov have conducted five surveys tracking
Americans’ views on guns. The results show a burst of support for gun reform in
the two weeks after the shooting, followed by a gradual reversion to the mean.
Once-heightened concerns about gun violence have tapered back to previous
levels, as has a desire for stricter gun laws and a belief that gun
restrictions can be passed without violating Second Amendment rights.
Florida’s legislature and Governor Rick Scott raised the
age to purchase any firearm to 21, and several states passed “red flag” gun
laws that allow a judge to temporarily seize guns from someone who might pose a
danger to themselves or others. But there’s been little movement on the bigger
priorities of gun-control advocates — an assault-weapons ban or more
restrictions on concealed-carry permits. There’s little question that most
media organizations tossed away traditional notions of objectivity and fairness
when it came to covering the gun issue after Parkland. They now must ask
themselves whether it was worth it.
“There’s never been a worse time to be a member of the
mainstream media,” Cox declared to roaring applause. Members of the national
media may dispute that, but they obtained this deep-rooted distrust and enmity
the old-fashioned way: They earned it.
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