Cowboy Confessional

While corning through Florida to visit family, I was subjected to the Space Coast daily journal which has, since inception, masqueraded as a newspaper.

I’m not overly nicking Florida Today (the bastard child of USA Today, sired by the same nefarious father, Al Neuharth).  It is what it is, and with the exception of when Billy Cox first hired on and wrote essays which linger in my mind decades later, this local fish wrapper met mainly the needs of the region’s growing Alzheimer population and their ever shortening attention spans.  Florida Today never possessed much journalistic gravitas, evidenced by their unapologetic endorsement of NASA’s over budget existence and gun control.  Old Al was often a gun control industry pied piper, misspending precious op/ed column inches to promote what Floridians routinely rejected.

So Matt Reed’s essay fails to surprise.

I’ll save you having to read it, though masochists are welcome to indulge their personal pain fetishes.  Summarized, he slams the National Rifle Association for opposing what Reed’s employer routinely endorses.  Specifically the NRA is opposed to requiring doctors to discuss guns with patients (if you are scratching you cranium wondering why any random AMA shaman needs to talk about guns while treating your toe fungus, then you have at least two functioning dendra, twice Reed’s current count).

I rhetorically rag on Reed not because he has an opinion, though his seems perfectly unfounded (making him the intellectual equal of my congressman) but because he commits the sin of obvious and objectionable bias, a curse alleged journalist should avoid.  Indeed, his colors show so plainly that I fear his opinions were delivered from the Violence Policy Center to Reed’s office in suppository form.

First, and most painfully obvious, is Reed’s misuse of the phrase “gun lobby.”  Foremost, the NRA is not the “gun lobby”, that role being owned by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (they represent firearm manufacturer interest).  The phrase “gun lobby” is routinely launched by every gun control group and politician opposed to gun owners or their rights (the phrase appears more than 43,000 times on the Brady Campaign web site alone).  Indeed, the very word “lobby” or “lobbyist” scores high on the negative connotation scale, evidenced by a late 80’s study on the biasing use of language by the media (Harvard School of Journalism if I recall correctly). Calling the NRA a “gun lobby” as opposed to a “civil rights group” shows both extremes of word selection to bias reader perception.  Reed’s sin is less journalistic oversight than incautiously parroting what he ingests from his political bedmates.

Where Reed wanders into the irrational desert is with his cite-free assumption about the NRA’s position, or to repeat Reed’s pejorative, the NRA’s ‘rationale’.  There are ample examples of gun control industry attempts to classify firearms as an ‘epidemic’, which explains the oodles of lucre the Joyce Foundation gives to medical schools and doctors to perform criminological research (don’t ponder that obvious inequity for long lest your brain explode from the irrationality of it all).  In several instances around the nation, bills had been proffered to compel doctors to discuss firearms with patients, in a bare-assed attempt to make patients antsy while force feeding them inaccurate ‘facts’ about firearm fatality.  If the gun control industry is attempting to recruit doctors to spread propaganda, therein may be the true nature of opposition opinion.  Or if the Obama administration is angling to induce the same system via Federal power (and we know from Barry’s past that he is no friend of the Second Amendment … or the other nine for that matter) then state-level preemption is a likely a legislative prophylactic.

As an aside, if a doctor does ask you about firearms for any other reason that to find a better load for hunting season, demand that he display his credentials for criminology or social science research.  If he fails to produce any, then describe to him some novel sexual uses for his stock of tongue depressors and require him to demonstrate the procedure on himself.

We must accept that everybody has biases.  But the media, which once had power, was held to a higher standard because of that power.  The requirement to be unbiased remains despite the declining influence of the media in general and newspapers in particular (though accusing Florida Today of being a newspaper stretches the bounds of linguistic limberness).  Matt’s meandering is merely a naked display of his biases, and an example of why The People are progressively bypassing the media.  I can’t blame the financial woes newspapers have on such biases alone, but they are more significant than anyone in that industry dares admit.

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This entry was posted by Guy Smith on Monday, March 21st, 2011 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Gun control, Media, Politics, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.