The Story That Wouldn't Die
MSNBC Blatantly Distorts Gun News
MSNBC Blatantly Distorts Gun News
In 1997 a Media Watch study concluded the media was biased against guns. The study found there were 87 stories favorable to the gun control lobby to every 4 stories favorable to gun rights. To anyone who has watched media reporters mutilate the English language and firearms terminology to dramatize a news story involving guns, this is old news.
Today, while reporters still flaunt their complete ignorance (my second favorite is San Francisco's KGO radio reporter Holly Kwan's description of a semi-automatic machine gun) some media outlets have cast truth in jouralism aside entirely.
That's exactly what MSNBC did regarding a recent story of an armed man at an Arizona healthcare meeting. I commented on it a few days later in this blog entry. But I never expected MSNBC to blatently lie about the entire thing.
Even the Washington Times ran an editorial about it, entitled False Reports About Guns. I've watched the replays of the MSNBC report and I can tell you that I was seriously outraged at MSNBC's distortion and lies.
In short, here's what happened. An African-American gentleman showed up at an Arizona healthcare event while legally carrying both a pistol and an AR-15 rifle. The media predictably focused on the gun and when police declared the man's actions legal they speculated for many minutes on his "apparent motive".
But MSNBC, in revisting the "anger" at townhall meetings over healthcare, showed a snippet of "a man with a rifle" with the man's race intentionally obscured. Their on-air personalities then painted the armed man as a white racist angry about a black president and national healthcare. It was almost one hundred percent likely that they know the protester was black, not white.
Watch a clip of this "news" segment using this YouTube link and tell us what you think.
In my opinion, this is the same kind of yellow journalism that resulted in the firing of CBS Anchor Dan Rather. This is the kind of distorted "news" one would expect to see in a movie like 1984. There are plenty of video sources that showed the rifle was carried by a black man and from several angles. MSNBC had to work hard to focus on a short snippet that obscured the man's race. And the hosts of that program either knew what they were doing or are simply incompetent to be journalists.