Cowboy Confessional

It never troubles me to call out a liar. When they work in the media it is a downright pleasure.

This tiny tale relates the troubled souls of the Oakland Tribune, two of their writers and its Gollum editor Martin Reynolds. Martin’s misdeeds are a case study in why old media in general and newspapers in particular are a dying breed.

In May the Trib ran an article penned in tag team by two of their journalist. I misuse the term journalist herein because what they wrote in no way resembles reporting. The topic of their corrupt correspondence was gun control, and the piece was proffered in advance of a mayoral campaign by a well known advocate of gun control. I will not accuse these literary desperadoes of prostituting themselves for a politician, especially one known as the “Bay Area Bagman” and under investigation by the FBI. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if these hacks turned a trick, bending over for an elected thief.

Their reporting was contemptible correspondence. This peculiar piece did not meet minimal journalistic standards and was beyond slanted. Any reporter with integrity would have sought balanced sources, multiple perspectives and dug under the issue’s skin. These folks didn’t bother to look beneath their own distorted and seemingly psychotic version of reality. They spoke only to representatives of the gun control industry, misstated facts, cited unreliable sources and quoted discredited researchers.

They may well have smoked their breakfast. After all, they work in Oaksterdam.

I popped off a tirade to the Trib, demanding they print a retraction. I knew exactly what I was asking and did not take my demand lightly. A retraction is an admission of guilt by a newspaper for printing something they shouldn’t have. In the case of this pile of journalistic dung, a retraction was in order. A retraction, an apology, several thousand Hail Marys and possibly even a human sacrifice — the Trib had two reporters who were worthy candidates for the latter.

Martin Reynolds, the editor of the Oakland Tribune, emailed me shortly thereafter, saying in part:

However, the points you have made from what I can tell don’t come close to constituting the need for a retraction. You may not agree with the tenor of the story, or agree with the way it was sourced and what information was not reported, but writing a story in this manner does not warrant a retraction. Not even close.

Martin conveniently missed the point. I never complained about the “tenor” of the piece. I complained that their reporters abdicated their responsibilities as journalist. Anyone even faintly acquainted the political football of gun control would agree that the Oakland Tribune’s reporting lay somewhere between negligent and fraudulent. Martin might not appreciate blunt assessments of his staff’s shortcomings as journalists and human beings, but he misrepresented the nature of the problem and complaint as slickly as his two reporters misrepresented everything.

He also did not bother to question his questioner. Had he performed two seconds of investigative journalism himself, he would have ascertained my position as one of the Bay Area’s top gun control policy experts (I even used my GunFacts.info email address, which should have been his first lead) and one who had published op/eds in his paper previously. This miscue became comically evident when he finished his email with:

And I don’t think you read the story very closely if you think the reporter equated guns shows (sic) with guns on the streets.

Silly me for not closely reading the article before demanding a retraction, and in the process detailing why the article was beneath the lowest of journalistic bars as well as contempt.

I fired off a reply to Martin offering that he or his minions contradict my observation. I suggested the Oakland Tribune serialize the article, having the original reporters interview criminologists with opposing views on the sources for crime guns, or at very least explain why they were excluded in the original story. I strongly suggested that his reporters at very least ask gun-owners rights groups for data that might counterpoint the sound bites they had blindly parroted for the Brady Campaign, the Violence Policy Center and the Joyce Foundation-funded university medical researcher they quoted.

Martin was unimpressed with my suggestion that his reporters commit work or journalism. He did take up my gauntlet, and replied:

As editor of this newspaper I endeavor to give voice to as many perspectives as possible. May I also suggest you write a letter to the editor, or a short 500 word opinion piece we call a “My Word” stating your views and concerns with the story. I would be happy to make sure it gets on our opinion page.

I emphasize the last sentence as prelude and the cornerstone of evidence that Martin Reynolds has no respect for his own integrity or that of his profession.

Most people would be intimidated by his offer. Being a writer, a gun policy expert and more than ready to lead public opinion back from the intellectual wastelands into which the Oakland Tribune led them, I sent off a piece within a couple of days. I did not attack the Trib, its writers or even Martin. I simply positioned the facts behind Oakland’s crime wave and how gun control was not the answer. As always, I tailed the submission with a small stack of citations from quality research and government sources. I sent the piece in reply email to Martin, copying his promise to publish. Then I waited.

And waited, and waited, and …

I gave Martin nearly a month to reply and/or publish, pinging him upon occasion, checking the Tribune web site and even resubmitting the op/ed through their online interface. Nada. I searched the Oakland Trib web site daily using both my name and various keywords to find my response to their journalistic lapse.

I finally gave up, rewrote the piece, submitted it to the San Francisco Chronicle. They printed it shortly thereafter.

Allow a tally:

• The Oakland Tribune published a piece of journalistic effluvium
• An expert on the topic complained
• The editor of the Trib promised to publish an opposing perspective
• The editor reneged on his promise

The price one places on their self-respect varies from person to person. The average man won’t sell his at any price. A politician or an Oakland Tribune reporter sells theirs at a discount. A street walker sells hers for spare change. But the editor of the Oakland Tribune gains not a penny for his - he cannot sell what he does not posses.

If you feel compelled to remind Marin that journalistic integrity is essential, feel free to pop him a note at mreynolds@bayareanewsgroup.com.

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News headline writers should be considered criminal suspects until proven otherwise.

Because of my expertise in gun control policy, I receive daily feeds of news stories concerning the subject. I was rather surprised today to see two “identical” news stories with very different headlines. One headline amplified the core political story and the other amplified the bias of the reporting newsroom. That for former was a newspaper in good repute and the latter was a TV station is not a surprise.
When I say the stories were “identical”, I’ll note that the report from a television web site was a reduced version of the newspaper report, but copied their content word-for-word.

The newspaper in question is the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a truly great paper which I had the please of reading for seven years while residing in the magnificent city of Richmond, VA. They report that a state agency will review private sales of firearms at gun shows. This is a sensitive issue nationally, but especially in Virginia where we have held suspicion of the intentions of government ever since Patrick Henry said “Give me liberty of give me death.”

The Times-Dispatch rightly headlined the piece “Gingerly, panel to examine gun show sales.” Though incomplete, the headline cornered the issue of how the government will delicately investigate if private sales of firearms at gun shows contribute to guns entering the underground market (this is a useless review given the standing criminological research that concludes such leakage is minimal).

Keep in mind that the city of Richmond is in the center of the state, cradled by urban, suburban, and rural regions. It truly reflects the state’s varied populations and thus is quite attuned to neutral phraseology.

The TV station is in Washington D.C. where guns are, for practical purposes, banned. The TV station headline reads “Va. Crime Commission To Study Gun Show Loophole.”

For those unfamiliar with the debate, the phrase “gun show loophole” is a fanciful and borderline insane description of the issue. It was invented by organizations with stated goals of eliminating private firearm ownership. Aside from being a inaccurate issue statement, the term “gun show loophole” is designed to invoke fear by falsely insinuating that there is an unintended oversight in the law.

It is instructive then to see that the television station borrowed a lobbyist phrasing in order to invoke fear in their viewership, and not the more reasoned original headline provided by the newspaper.

The funny part is that biased folks in the media still don’t understand why they are losing market- and mind-share. Folks, if you repeatedly mislead people — especially in the age of the Internet and instant fact crosschecking — they will soon ignore you as an unreliable source.

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Liberalism has been called the politics of wishful thinking.

In actuality it is the politics of hope above reality, which gives and entirely new dimension the Obama brand.

A tragic case in point is the latest squandering of scratch this side of Congressional salaries. In my silly city of San Francisco, the government has sought to house the homeless. A noble ideal and one grounded in the same ruthless, rational logic of any Monty Python skit.

The Mayor — a locally grown Bill Clinton, replete with his own trouser problems — last year predicted his pet project and election gimmick would provide “healthy, affordable housing for 106 formerly homeless individuals.”

Affordable it is given that the bill is footed by people with homes, jobs, incomes, kids to raise, and a larger than ever tax bill. “Healthy” it might be if it weren’t for secondhand crack cocaine smoke in the hallways. In San Francisco’s Plaza Apartments, you don’t even need a “contact high” — respiration is sufficient.

As with Federal public housing projects before, The Mayor was oblivious to the mechanics of crime and poverty. Ignoring decades of research into why people become homeless, Frisco conceptualized a simple (and thus simplistic) solution of giving homes to the homeless. This assumed that homelessness was the cause, and not merely a symptom of another and larger problem.

A government flunky, in a rare moment of lucidity, noted “80 to 90 percent of the people we have are struggling with drug use. We know when we bring those people indoors those issues do not go away.”

He later said the sky was blue, bunnies are cute, and that Gavin Newsom in no way deserved the salary he receives.

Various surveys of homeless hominids claim that between 68% to 90% have become full time sidewalk campers due to drug and alcohol abuse. Interviewing these folks shows that they were born with better options. None started life with a crack pipe in the infant lips and begging for spare change from other babies. They descended the societal ladder one drink or rock at a time.

Much like Paris Hilton’s panties.

This is the norm of criminality as well as self destruction. Crime does not cause criminal behaviour. The poor tend to be victims of criminals because a life of crime leads to poverty and thugs descend into poor neighborhoods. You don’t have to take my word on this. Throughout the rural South are good, decent, hard-working people still farming the forty acres their ancestors were awarded. These people are about as poor as you could fear becoming, and yet are not innately prone to committing crimes. Nor are they routinely victimized since criminals tend to light in cities where their targets are more numerous and thus their trade is more profitable.

Then they run for office.

This why public housing projects are deadly districts of maddening malfeasance. Once the poor were warehoused into centralized locations, criminals drifted into the projects, bringing their life-long habits with them. When the government made single motherhood possible, if not profitable, gang games became even more lucrative. Mobile sperm donors, unshackled from the bonds of marriage and raising their offspring, could continue their felonious existence. Crime became a lifestyle.
The same systematics apply to San Francisco’s Homeless Hilton. Take a population of people — 70% or more of whom cannot keep bottles from their lips and needles out of their veins — and stack them like corpulent cordwood into a central facility. One must expect the root cause of their low lifestyle to follow. Thinking that providing a roof and a stipend would change decade long addictions requires the special insanity reserved for politicians.

“[P]ermanent supportive housing solves homelessness,” is what Mayor Newsom said when the program received federal funding.

Nothing in the known universe (i.e., reality) can make a boozer sober except the discipline to say “no”. The same applies to junkies and loco politicians with taxing authority.

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I live for irony, and it finds me daily. But sometimes it breaches the line that separates irony from absurdity.

There is a certain snake by the name of Senator Don Perata. I know Don, having sat with him in a corporate board while he engineered a few million in corporate welfare. I have talked him down in front of reporters. In other words, I’ve been so close to him so often that my doctor insists on conducting frequent tests for slime infections.

Like most politicians, Don has one game he most enjoys playing, that being gun control. Don has never seen a gun control proposal that didn’t make him moisten his Depends. In California he has attempted to ban guns, tax ammunition into an unaffordable commodity, and has told many false tales about threats of violence from NRA members (he loves to tell that story to reporters, but whenever challenged to produce police reports on these ancient incidents, he or his demonic staffers demur).

So imagine my giggle fit when news broke that Don “The Bay Area Bagman” Perata had been carjacked … at gunpoint. All his efforts to disarm the general populace (I say “general” because Don has at least one handgun and the rarest of Bay Area artifacts, a concealed carry permit) seem to have been for naught.

The carjackers were prototypical street thugs. They were men in their 20’s. They worked in tandem (one walking up to the car, and another boxing Don in with another vehicle). They held their gun “gansta” style (sloppily sideways). They were dedicated criminals who most likely:

• Did not have a permit from the state to buy a gun.
• Did not wait the mandatory 10-day period to obtain a gun.
• Did not obtain a permit to carry their gun in public (unlike Perata).

In short, they willingly violated every law Don Perata enacted. Meanwhile my buddy Rich, a Vietnam vet, father of two, grandfather of three, who has held a job all of his life, paid his taxes, and has never broken a law more serious than speeding … he has obeyed all of those laws.

Perata never has “gotten it.” Don never stops long enough to separate chaff and understand the motivations and rationalizations of criminals. He fails to perform simple logic and isolate the good guys from the bad.

And now Don had a thug shove a gun up his nose while Rich and I chuckled. We laughed because we know the incident will not help clarify the issue for Perata. Some skulls are too thick.

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I always thought tattoos were dangerous. Now we have proof.

I don’t have any objection to tattoos on principle. In fact, a well placed tattoo on a woman can be sexy (especially if one treats them as a set of handlebars). But so many people now have tats that it is no longer cool. Skin and ink has become mainstream, and the few of us not wearing body art are the differentiated minority.

I always thought allowing some random biker — with a prison record and suspect hygiene — to jab a used needle into my epidermis bordered on insane. But two mentally challenged Texans have made getting a tattoo almost fatal.

Seems that either Robert Glasser and Joey Acosta of El Paso wanted a tattoo of a revolver. So in order to make their tat as realistic as possible, they decided to trace a real .357 mangle’em.

They didn’t bother to unload it first.

Somehow, Robert and Joey managed to shoot themselves at the same instant. One round staffed Robert’s hand and then clipped Joey’s arm. For this to happen, both “men” would have to have been on the barrel side of the loaded and cocked handgun. Triple stupid.

Sadly, Robert and Joey do not qualify for a Darwin Award, but might receive an honorable mention for trying.

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