The Media on Activist Autopilot with Embarrassing, Preemptive AR-15 Bashing
“This was a model of how we can cover news with both immediacy and in depth, with new tools, traditional skills, and enduring values.” This was Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron’s glowing assessment of his outlet’s performance on Tuesday in the wake of Monday’s horrific massacre at the Washington Navy Yard. This assertion may be a bit premature, considering the paper’s decision to publish an editorial demanding action to address how an ostensibly mentally ill man acquired his guns – including a shotgun, a variety of pistols, and an AR-15. But this call to action is based on erroneous early reports. The only gun that Aaron Alexis entered the Navy Yard with was a legally purchased shotgun. According to the FBI, Alexis acquired service handguns from his victims while inside the compound. An AR-15 was never used.
But the media is on cruise control. Political journalism’s antipathy towards the semi-automatic rifle was cemented in the summer of 2012 in the wake of the Aurora theater shooting and ratified after the Newtown massacre later that year. Regardless of the circumstances that led to this shooting, the press has taken the opportunity of this latest heart-rending massacre to lobby for their preferred cause: stricter gun laws –even if those laws are aimed at restricting access to a weapon that has nothing to do with the event on which they are reporting.
The New York Daily News jumped feet first into this tired pond of agitation and activism on Tuesday morning with a front page designed to shock. While this cover is slightly less irresponsible than the last foray into recklessness, when they linked the acquittal of George Zimmerman to that of the killers of Emmett Till, it nevertheless displays a scandalous lack of regard for journalistic ethics.
The cover art was framed around a fire-eating editorial by Mike Lupica, who embarrassed himself rather spectacularly with his emotional invective against a weapon he simply dislikes but which is not related to the news story upon which he insists he is commenting.
“They call semiautomatics like this sport rifles. You bet. Mostly for the sport of killing innocent people, and killing them fast,” Lupica fumes. His preening essay punctuated by terrible images of the victims of gun violence and the unhinged practitioners of mass violence, attacks every straw man available – including the National Rifle Association and even the government-created impulse to purchase firearms out of the fear that they will be banned (an impulse that Lupica, perhaps unwittingly, helps foster).
CNN’s Ben Brumfield joined Lupica in attacking the AR-15 without reason. “Sources,” he writes, “who have detailed knowledge of the investigation, cautioned that initial information that an AR-15 was used in the shootings may have been incorrect.”
With this obligatory caveat aside, he goes on to insist, “regardless” of the facts, that “the massacre pushed the AR-15 back into the gun-control debate.” It has, but only as a result of the relentless activism of the press.
But the emotional displays on cable news attacking the AR-15 make the print media’s advocacy appear sober and demur in comparison. The ever-agitated Piers Morgan took to his television program last night and berated anti-gun control activists who attempt to counter his calls for ill-defined stricter gun laws – though his appeal was not often to logic but to his subjective understanding of morality. His network further elevated the national dialogue by broadcasting a chyron that decried the problematic “AR-15 shotgun.”
…The AR-15 is not a shotgun.
Then there is MSNBC, where the saddest and most perfunctory agitation for stricter gun laws is ongoing, only somewhat dampened by the empirical evidence delivered by last week’s recall elections in Colorado. There, voters last week who sent the unmistakable message to Washington D.C. that actually passing new gun laws – rather than simply advocating for them along with a healthy dose of moral superiority — is a political liability for Democrats.
There, MSNBC contributor Joy-Ann Reid lamented that “sadly” the Navy Yard shooting will not create the political conditions that push lawmakers to support new gun laws. Also, She lamented that the AR-15 is extremely popular.
Why was that a necessary addition to her commentary? It was because she does not like that fact, not because it has anything to do with the Navy Yard shooting – the topic she was allegedly there to discuss.
The media has a credibility problem. Their preemptive crusade against American gun culture’s most popular weapon is not endearing them to the nation which subsidizes journalism by purchasing newspapers and patronizing cable news advertisers. This episode is just another which confirms what many discerning consumers of news and journalism already know: that the media does not like their customer base.
It does not take an MBA to understand that this is an unsustainable model for any consumer product to follow.
UPDATE: At noon Eastern Time, MSNBC broadcast an NBC News animation purportedly recreating the attack on the Navy Yard on Monday. In the animation, Alexis is featured using an AR-15… apparently, with a grenade launcher attachment.
Shortly after 9 a.m. ET on September 17, the FBI dispelled reports that Alexis used an AR-15.
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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
