There are always things that are popping up on my radar that send little bells spinning away in my brain. Today I want to point out two examples of things that have popped multiple times in the past couple of weeks, and they involve how “the media” chooses to cover events or not.
Over at Foxnews John Lott points out The Deafening Silence.
Murder and violent crime rates were supposed to soar after the Supreme Court struck down gun control laws in Chicago and Washington, D.C.
Politicians predicted disaster. “More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence,” Washington’s Mayor Adrian Fenty warned the day the court made its decision.
Chicago’s Mayor Daley predicted that we would “go back to the Old West, you have a gun and I have a gun and we’ll settle it in the streets . . . .”
The New York Times even editorialized this month about the Supreme Court’s “unwise” decision that there is a right for people “to keep guns in the home.”
But Armageddon never happened. Newly released data for Chicago shows that, as in Washington, murder and gun crime rates didn’t rise after the bans were eliminated — they plummeted. They have fallen much more than the national crime rate.
In other coverage of issues confronting the nation we seem to have the executive branch involved in a campaign to quiet the dissenting voices. Sharyl Atkinsson of CBS has been pursing the Gunwalker story over the past few months. In a
recent interview with Laura Ingraham Ms. Atkinson related the pressure that the White House, and Justice spokespeople have been bring to bear as she dug into the details of the story.
It now seems that Ms. Atkinsson is no longer allowed to speak outside of her
CBS duties:
Today, I called CBS News in an attempt to interview Attkisson. I was told by CBS News senior vice president of communications Sonya McNair that Attkisson would be unavailable for interviews all week. When I asked why Attkisson would be unavailable, McNair would not say.
I’ve also heard from a producer at another media outlet that has previously booked Attkisson that they tried to book her since she made news with the Laura Ingraham interview yesterday. They were also told that she would be unavailable.
After our initial conversation earlier today, I called McNair back and left a message with her office. I also sent McNair an email asking whether Attkisson’s unavailability has anything to do with reporting that the White House and Justice Department were angry at her. I further asked McNair if the White House or Justice Department contacted CBS News about Attkisson since yesterday. McNair has not responded to my inquiries.
Spin has been a part of “handling the press” since the press came along. But there really is a line out there that has been crossed not only by the politicians but also by the media organizations themselves. There is a place in the world for opinions and “op-ed” pieces and there is a place in the world for reporting the facts without “spin”. In many ways we have lost, or are loosing the latter and I don’t see a clear path to getting it back.