Guns
On Saturday afternoon, CNN Newsroom gave attention to a Johns Hopkins Hospital trauma surgeon who has been criticizing the NRA, but the liberal news network, even while interviewing him, did not divulge that he is a board member of the anti-gun Brady Campaign.
Imagine this scenario -- in the wake of yet another mass shooting by yet another lunatic who should have been committed but wasn't thanks to decades-long work by the ACLU, a celebrity known for his or her conservative views -- Jon Voight, for example, or Angie Harmon -- tells a reporter that he or she has decided to buy a gun for protection. The histrionics from the left would be swift and predictably cliched ... The last thing we need is more people with guns! ... You're part of the problem, not the solution! ... Support the right to arm bears!
New York Times music critic Jon Caramanica pompously condemned an entire genre of music for not writing about what he cares about: Gun violence. It follows the paper’s recent expressed annoyance that country isn’t on the entertainment industry’s ineffectual gun-control bandwagon: "It should be neither remarkable nor courageous for a country singer to address the plague of gun violence in this country. That mass shootings tore apart a country music festival a year ago and a country-music bar just two days ago makes the genre’s silence on the matter irresponsible and infuriating."
New York Times Nicholas Kristof has taken on an old nemesis, the National Rifle Association, in two multi-media pieces over the last two weeks – two weeks that have witnesses shooting tragedies. The Sunday Review brought the photo-heavy “Witness the N.R.A’s Evolution -- It’s magazine covers show how it shifted focus, to fanaticism.” A week earlier he said the group had been "hijacked by extremist leaders."
Perhaps annoyed that “jingoistic” country music is not yet as infested with left-wing promotional politics as other musical and entertainment fields, a major newspaper again used the annual Country Music Association Awards to push gun-control politics onto the industry, Reporter Elizabeth Harris garnered the front page of the New York Times Arts section for her Saturday piece “Singing About Pain, But Not Its Source -- A country awards show may discuss its slain fans, but guns and politics are unlikely topics.”
While ABC’s World News Tonight and the CBS Evening News largely stuck Friday to the investigation into the Thousand Oaks, California bar shooting and the grieving families, NBC Nightly News went political. Their strategy? Well, NBC took it upon itself to push gun bans and gun control with support from both a doctor’s group that the National Rifle Association (NRA) had tweeted about (before the shooting) and comments from a grieving mother calling for “no more guns.”
It came as no surprise on Thursday evening when two of CNN’s prime-time hosts reacted to the mass shooting earlier that day at a bar in Thousand Oaks, California, by once again calling for stringent gun control and, despite their claims otherwise, mocking religion and the importance of prayer. The one-sided discussion began when Cuomo Prime Time host Chris Cuomo tossed to CNN Tonight Don Lemon, host of the next show, CNN Tonight, and by the end of the segment, Cuomo mocked those who'd raise questions about their viewpoints, stating that they would paint the two as “Bonnie and Clyde of Fake News.”
Showing that he’s anything but a fair news anchor, CNN’s The Situation Room host Wolf Blitzer was yet another journalist who tried to make the Thousand Oaks, California bar shooting about gun control despite the state having perhaps the country’s strictest gun laws and state mental health experts had cleared the disturbed individual (thus still allowing him to purchase firearms).
On Thursday's Cuomo Prime Time, CNN host Chris Cuomo ended his show with a commentary in which he complained about voters not makng gun control a higher priority when they voted a few days ago. He also declared that politicians who express "thoughts and prayers" after a mass shooting are mocking the victims.
So, just like macabre clockwork. With Thursday’s mass shooting at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks, California, there were routine calls for more gun control from the liberal media machine. During their evening broadcasts, CBS and NBC tried to scare the wits out of their viewers by dubiously claiming that there had been 307 mass shooting this year alone, or almost one a day. But that was a lie.
MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews went on a ghoulish tear Thursday night responding to the Thousand Oaks, California bar shooting, bashing religion by telling Democratic Congresswoman Jackie Speier (CA) that “thoughts and prayers...should be outlawed” because it means that you don’t “give a damn” about the victims and that gun rights (as enshrined in the Constitution) do not come from God.
As CBS informed viewers of a number of ballot initiatives that were passed in various states on Tuesday, both the CBS Evening News and the CBS This Morning on Wednesday only showed interest in cases in which liberals were victorious. By contrast, FNC's Special Report with Bret Baier and Fox and Friends gave attention to a mixture of both conservative and liberal victories.