Guns

The extent of the media's influence to shape public opinion was on full display in a new Pew Research Center poll that shows, even though gun crime has dropped by half since its peak in the mid '90s, most Americans (56 percent) wrongly think gun violence has increased. In an L.A. Times article that highlighted the poll, Emily Alpert posited "It's unclear whether media coverage is driving the…

On Tuesday's CBS This Morning, Charlie Rose and Norah O'Donnell pressed Senator Joe Manchin about a possible new push for gun control in Congress. Rose wondered how Manchin and his allies could make legislation "more palatable to those people who may be afraid of it", while O'Donnell bluntly asked the Democrat, "Are you frustrated with the NRA?" Manchin was their only guest on the gun issue…

Appearing on Monday's Tonight Show, NBC Today co-host Savannah Guthrie told Jay Leno that President Obama was "deeply disappointed" by gun control legislation being voted down, prompting the late night host to complain: "Why do you think he's not able to close a deal? This seems to happen a lot....how come Obama hits this wall sometimes?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump…

The air was thick with disingenuousness on Saturday’s Today show as NBC conducted a long-distance interview with the daughter of the slain Sandy Hook Elementary School principal. Co-anchor Erica Hill brought up the charge that Erica Lafferty has been used as a prop by the gun control crowd. Of course, in the process, NBC was using Lafferty as a prop during that very interview. Lafferty was…

Apparently not even Chris Matthews listens to Chris Matthews. On Monday's Hardball, the liberal anchor compared the speeches at the National Rifle Association's 2013 convention to the Nazis. Three minutes later, he decried the use of Nazi comparisons. On the same program, Matthews insisted that the Republican Party has forgiven the assassination  of GOP President Abraham Lincoln. As he played…

On the Friday, May 3, Politics Nation, MSNBC host Al Sharpton fretted over the video that was played at Friday's NRA convention in Houston to introduce Rick Perry which shows the Texas governor firing at targets with an AR-15. Sharpton began the segment:

On Friday's All In show, with the words "The Sickness" displayed on screen behind him, MSNBC host Chris Hayes began the show with a commentary in which he tagged the NRA as a "far-right fringe organization" that "might be spelling their own demise" by celebrating the defeat of the universal background check proposal. Hayes:

ABC reporters over the weekend huffed that the National Rifle Association took a "victory lap" and sneered that the gun group was "using" the Boston bombing at their recent convention. Reporter Reena Ninan on Sunday chided, "NRA leaders found a way to use the recent bombings in Boston, even shooting tragedies, to expand support for their organization." On Monday's Good Morning America,…

After conservative radio host Dana Loesch tweeted about firing "all manner" of guns with friends at her local range this past weekend, CNN's resident gun police Piers Morgan swooped in to badger her. Twitchy had the exchange. Morgan mocked Loesch's gun range tweet, "Yee-haw!" and pointed out, for all those unaware, that the AR-15 rifle she tweeted a picture of was "The assault rifle used at…

As NewsBusters previously reported, CBS Late Show host David Letterman spent a week last month attacking Senators as stooges - mostly Republicans, of course - for opposing recent gun control legislation. One such Senator, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, told WABC radio's Aaron Klein Sunday, “That’s kind of a badge of honor. Any time you get Rachel Maddow or Letterman or those people to call you…

Time was, several decades ago, that local and regional news in many parts of the country served as a bit of an antidote against the relentlessly biased national establishment press. That certainly isn't the case in Aurora, Colorado, site of last year's horrible theater murders at the alleged hands of James Holmes. Dave Perry, the editor of the Aurora Sentinel, wrote a column on April 25…

Coming up next on MSNBC, further evidence of the link between global warming and the National Rifle Association, which the gun lobby inexplicably continues to deny ... How reassuring it is for liberals to trot out their various all-purpose boogeymen to blame for whatever frustrates liberals at any given moment.

The staunchly pro-gun control Chris Matthews on Friday sneered that the National Rifle Association is doing a "dance of death" in celebration of their victory over Barack Obama. Regarding senators who voted with the gun group, the Hardball host mocked, "These are the guys who took the easiest vote in American political history. They backed the NRA." He added that "it was almost a religious…

On Thursday's The Last Word, MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell attacked the owners of the gun maker Crickett as "merchants of death" after a five-year-old boy in Kentucky, without adult supervision, used one of their guns to kill his younger sister: "The names I want you to know are the merchants of death, the merchants of this death, the guys who made and sold the rifle that killed this two-year-…