Today another New York state court upheld an earlier decision in March that invalidated outgoing Mayor Mike Bloomberg's much-maligned "soda ban" which restricts many establishments in the Big Apple from selling soda cups larger than 16 ounces in capacity. As the media report on the court ruling, watch for a) the media to paint the ruling as a "blow" to an "ambitious," well-meaning effort by Bloomberg to save the city from corpulence and b) the ruling as a victory for Big Soda, even though the litigants in the case happen to be the New York Statewide Coalition of Hispanic Chambers of Commerce.

For two examples of this media narrative, I submit for your consideration two wildly different publications, Politico and, sadly, the Wall Street Journal. First Politico. Here's how Kyle Cheney opened his July 30 post, "Appeals court cans N.Y.C. soda ban" (emphasis mine):

From time to time, Americans manage to elect extraordinarily corruptible people—and these walking moral catastrophes, in turn, pass laws for us, enforce those laws for us, presume to lecture us, and run, in general, as much of our lives as they can gets their hands on. It's not that we don't care about being governed by vulgarians, and it's not that we're pathologically gullible—so what is it? What's the secret of their success? How do they hold on to power for so long? The short answer is: the media—with a little help from human nature.

Such was the case with Weinergate, which most people still regard as a sex scandal and not the story of a scandalous character. Former Congressman Anthony Weiner has recently begun his campaign to become the next mayor of New York City, and given New York’s bizarre and inexplicable gluttony for punishment, he has a real chance of being elected. Then again, maybe New Yorkers are catching on – the fact that Weiner was booed last weekend at a parade offers a sliver of hope.

The suburban New York paper that caused a nationwide uproar over its online interactive map of gun permit owners in two counties has finally removed the chart from its website.

The map prompted thousands of complaints to the paper which also prompted the anti-gun paper to hire its own armed guards supposedly to protect its employees. The removal of the map was preceded by a new state law which protects gun permit holders’ privacy:

The Lower Hudson Valley's Journal News based in White Plains, New York has been very tight-lipped since it published an interactive map showing the names and addresses of pistol permit holders in Westchester and Rockland Counties. The Washington Post's Erik Wemple reports that the paper has hired "a Manhattan public relations, marketing and government affairs firm" whose job appears to involve denying interview requests and issuing "no comment" statements.

Predictably, the one media outlet which has been granted access by the Journal News is the New York Times, whose Christine Haughney filed a report on January 6. In that dispatch, she quoted Dwight R. Worley, the "tax reporter" who cooked up the idea of publishing the map, putting forth the following defense of his handiwork: "The people have as much of a right to know who owns guns in their communities as gun owners have to own weapons." How disingenuous, as will be seen after the jump.

The media agenda against guns is nothing new. But recent mass shootings have encouraged supposedly neutral journalists to push for gun regulation instead of reporting the facts surrounding the tragedies.

One thing the media seldom mention is that both the Newtown and Aurora shootings occurred in gun free zones. In the Clackamas Town Center Shooting in Oregon, however, a gunman was stopped when someone with a concealed carry permit intervened. There were only two casualties in this shooting which received little media attention. If this incident was mentioned, the concealed carry part of the story was almost completely ignored.