On Sunday, The Daily Beast's Christopher Dickey furiously tried to connect the Second Amendment to the protection of slavery before the Civil War. Dickey touted how Charles Dickens and "several British visitors to American shores...discerned... [that] people who owned slaves...wanted to carry guns to keep the blacks intimidated and docile." He also wildly claimed that "the Second Amendment...was essentially written to protect the interests of Southerners" to crush slave revolts.
Labeling
By Matthew Balan | December 7, 2015 | 1:49 PM EST
On Monday's New Day, CNN's Alisyn Camerota badgered Senator Rand Paul over President Obama's call for Congress to ban terror suspects from buying firearms: "That's one that seems as though it should be easy to fix. Why not close the loophole that allows suspects on the FBI's no-fly list to buy guns?" When Senator Paul cited how Ted Kennedy was on the no-fly list, Camerota shot back, "Look, I mean, I hear you, but fix the watch list. That's an issue of fixing the watch list...not to, somehow, let terrorists get their hands on guns."
By Tom Blumer | December 7, 2015 | 2:04 AM EST
At the Associated Press Sunday evening, White House Correspondent Julie Pace's coverage of President Obama's Oval Office address was predictably weak.
One could cite at least a half-dozen problems with Pace's story, but two of them were particularly disingenuous.
By Tom Blumer | December 6, 2015 | 6:07 PM EST
As shown early this morning, the press's redefinition of the term "mass shooting" has turned into a nearly omnipresent meme virtually overnight in the wake of Wednesday's Islamic terrorist massacre in San Bernardino, California. Under the new, demonstrably indefensible definition which not only breaks with past practice but also pretends it never existed, there have been 355 "mass shootings" so far this year in the U.S. As consistently defined for many previous years, the actual number is 4.
Just two months ago, the incurably left-biased "fact checker" site Politifact, in evaluating a "mass shooting" total of 294 claimed by Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, asserted that she "used an overly broad definition of what most people would consider a mass shooting."
By Tom Blumer | December 6, 2015 | 1:06 AM EST
At the Washington Post's Wonkblog on Wednesday, Christopher Ingraham claimed that the San Bernardino massacre, which we now know was an act of Islamic terrorism, was the "355th" mass shooting "this year." A Google search on "355th mass shooting this year" (not in quotes) indicates that the stat has become a media meme, repeated at places like the Today Show, PBS, NPR, NBCnews.com, and too many others to mention.
In a New York Times op-ed on Thursday — one which predictably appears not to have made the paper's print edition — Mark Follman, national affairs editor at Mother Jones, of all places, wrote that Ingraham and others in the media, including the Times itself are wrong — by a factor of 89. As consistently defined until very recently, there have been four mass shootings in the U.S. year, and 73 since 1982.
By Curtis Houck | December 5, 2015 | 11:03 PM EST
On Saturday, the “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC continued to prove why the liberal media loves congratulating itself for their so-called accomplishments as the morning and evening newscasts spent nearly four minutes (without teases) cheering the “historic” decision by The New York Times to publish a “dramatic” front-page editorial chiding gun rights advocates and pushing for massive gun control/confiscation.
Salon Asst. Editor Ridiculed Megyn Kelly, Attack-Predicting Guest 2 Weeks Before San Bernardino Massacre
By Tom Blumer | December 5, 2015 | 10:43 AM EST On November 18, Scott Eric Kaufman, an assistant editor at Salon, clearly thought that he had identified easy objects for ridicule in Megyn Kelly and former radical Muslim fundamentalist Morten Storm.
Kaufman ridiculed Fox as "nightmare fuel for elderly white people who just want to celebrate Christmas" after Storm, a former al Qaeda terrorist, predicted that "within the next two weeks, we will have an attack" on U.S. soil on a "softer target." Kaufman really ought to be more careful about whom he mocks — but then again, he's at Salon, where there's apparently no accountability, or sense of shame.
By Matthew Balan | December 5, 2015 | 12:35 AM EST
Friday's NBC Nightly News and CBS Evening News both spotlighted the New York Daily News's latest anti-conservative front page, which denigrated Wayne LaPierre of the NRA as a "terrorist." CBS's Nancy Cordes touted how "the always-heated gun debate has gotten personal. The New York Daily News...called the head of the National Rifle Association a 'terrorist.'" NBC's Hallie Jackson played up the liberal newspaper's attack, as well as The New Yorker's "provocative" cover targeting gun owners.
By Matthew Balan | December 4, 2015 | 7:35 PM EST
On Friday, the CBS This Morning anchors badgered Marco Rubio on his opposition to gun control. Gayle King touted Obama's words on the issue: "The President said...that it's far too easy for people to get weapons, and that we need to figure out a way to make it harder for them. In this particular case...it wouldn't have made a difference. But there are so many other cases it seems...that it would have made a difference." King later wondered, "What about the freedom of Americans to go to the mall; to go to church; to go to school?"
New York Daily News Strikes Again; Compares ‘Terrorist’ NRA, LaPierre to Farook, Adam Lanza, Dylann Roof
By Curtis Houck | December 4, 2015 | 2:27 AM EST Further displaying their ability to have no shame, the far-left, anti-religious New York Daily News emerged late Thursday to unveil the cover of its Friday paper that compares alleged San Bernardino gunman Syed Farook to the “terrorist” National Rifle Association (NRA) and long-time executive Wayne LaPierre plus four other perpetrators of mass killings over the past three years.
By Curtis Houck | December 3, 2015 | 9:18 PM EST
Following the liberal media’s strategy of attacking God-fearing people for offering their “thoughts and prayers” concerning the San Bernardino shooting, Thursday’s NBC Nightly News joined that chorus with a unrelenting report from NBC News correspondent and MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell that also lamented the lack of Democratic gun control proposals. She touted: "Liberal blogger Igor Volsky set off a tweet storm, calling out lawmakers who offer prayers but oppose new gun laws, pointing out how much money they received from the NRA."
By Matthew Balan | December 3, 2015 | 6:56 PM EST
On Thursday's Wolf program, CNN's Fareed Zakaria touted "the extraordinary ease with which people can obtain these extraordinarily destructive weapons." Zakaria played up that "these stories of gun violence really do...alarm the rest of the world....With gun violence, the United States is essentially alone in the world. There is no other country that has anything remotely approaching the kind of violence we do. The only country that comes even close is Yemen — which is, essentially, a war zone."