“There’s A Larger Story”: Why Won’t The Press Put U.S. Gun Violence In Context?
Another unfolding American gun massacre has produced an avalanche news coverage, but it’s coverage that continues to omit crucial context about gun violence and the rash of often public shooting sprees that plague the country. It’s a troubling journalism trend, and one that seems to be getting worse. As America recoils from new shootings, the news media are casting the gun horrors in less context, not more.
It’s true that the press is moving away from presenting shooting sprees as isolated incidents. The coverage of the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre in Newtown, Conn., has been rich with references to the Aurora, Colo., movie theater massacre from this summer. Then again, how can reporters not connect the dots from those two rampages to a sweeping cultural and criminal problem, and one that continues to worsen and extends to all corners of the country.
But simply acknowledging the deadly trend doesn’t mean the news media are providing much-needed context. For instance, each year roughly 30,000 Americans die from gun violence. By comparison, since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, approximately 4,300 Americans have died in that conflict.
As Forbes’ Rob Waters noted, from the period between 2000 to 2009, “If you exclude natural causes of death and consider only deaths caused by injury, [gun violence] is the second-leading cause of death over that time span; only car accidents (417,000) killed more people.” And according to Bloomberg News, the number of Americans killed by guns will soon exceed the yearly number of auto fatalities, as auto-related deaths are falling and gun fatalities are rising.
To understand the larger story of gun violence in America, people have to understand the context. People have to be aware of the 30,000 figure. They ought to know, for instance, that in the week since Newtown, an estimated 500 Americans have died from gunfire, and more than 1,200 have been wounded. They ought to know that just since the Sand Hook School massacre, approximately 50 more American children and teens have died from gunfire.
If we don’t understand the saturation status we’re not going to understand the steady stream of public shooting sprees.
But news consumers aren’t getting that information from the media – at least not in the wake of the Newtown tragedy.
Very few mentions of the 30,000 statistic have appeared in newspaper articles or on television segments about the Connecticut massacre. In fact, a Nexis search uncovers only two major newspaper news articles that referenced that key figure in the last week, one in the San Francisco Chronicle, on December 18, and one in the Hartford Courant December 19. (The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Tampa Tribune and Indianapolis Star published references to the 30,000-death statistic in opinion pieces about the Newtown killings.)
On television, the references were just as rare: I found only four. One each on PBS, CNN, NBC and MSNBC.
It’s possible that a handful of additional newspaper news accounts and television discussions mentioned the fact that approximately 30,000 people die from gunfire every year. (Nexis transcripts don’t capture every cable news segment.) But given the extraordinary amount of coverage of the Newtown shooting, the press had ample opportunities to highlight the 30,000 number. But these findings indicate that the references were quite scarce. In fact, they were even scarcer than when I urged the press to include crucial gun death context following the Aurora gun massacre in July.
Other key points that have been largely ignored in the Newtown coverage:
•There are huge economic costs associated with gun violence. For example, firearm-related deaths and injuries resulted in medical and lost of productivity expenses of about $32 billion in the U.S., according to most recently available data.
•Gun violence is among the leading causes of premature death in the U.S.
•Among the world’s 23 wealthiest countries, 87 percent of all kids killed by guns are American kids.
The point here isn’t to simply to wallow in a grim statistics. It’s to illustrate how little context is included in the so-called ‘gun debate’ in this country. And especially the so-called gun debate that takes place in the media.
If that conversation is really going to happen it’s imperative Americans understand what’s at the center of the topic, and that sadly, this crisis extends far beyond Newtown.
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America, December 21, 2012
“The NRA Shoots Itself In The Foot”: A Shill For Gun Manufacturers And The Home Of Unhinged Conspiracy Theorists
The National Rifle Association finally weighed in on the gun debate today, in a news conference (albeit one in which they took no questions) setting out their feelings at this critical moment. And they gave the movement for greater restrictions on guns the biggest favor it could have hoped for. While the organization was once devoted to marksmanship and gun safety, in recent years it has increasingly become a shill for the gun manufacturers that fund it and the home of unhinged conspiracy theorists. As it showed today, the worst thing it can do for its cause is to step into the light.
You can read Wayne LaPierre’s entire statement here, but here’s a choice excerpt:
We care about the President, so we protect him with armed Secret Service agents. Members of Congress work in offices surrounded by armed Capitol Police officers.
Yet when it comes to the most beloved, innocent and vulnerable members of the American family — our children — we as a society leave them utterly defenseless, and the monsters and predators of this world know it and exploit it. That must change now!
The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters — people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every day. And does anybody believe that the next Adam Lanza isn’t planning his attack on a school he’s already identified at this very moment?
The italics and exclamation points are in the original. LaPierre went on to say, “There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people.” Gun manufacturers? Nope. Hollywood! He went on to blame the news media, and even added a little doomsday prepper rhetoric (“Add another hurricane, terrorist attack or some other natural or man-made disaster, and you’ve got a recipe for a national nightmare of violence and victimization”). And then came the proposal: What we need to do, LaPierre said, is immediately place armed police officers in every school in America.
So the NRA’s plan is this: Make sure that as many people as possible buy as many guns as possible and are allowed to take them into as many places as possible. And then, as this army of “monsters and predators” descends upon our schools, have someone there to return fire. Sounds reasonable.
If the NRA had just kept its head low like it did after every other mass shooting we’ve had in recent years, it would have done itself a favor. But I think that in years to come we may look back on this press conference as one of the key moments in a change in how people and legislators think of the NRA. It was a big public reminder, to people who may not have been aware of it, that these people are crazy. Even many gun owners, and many of the NRA’s own members, think the positions the organization takes are too extreme. When it’s this public about its dream vision of the society it would like to see, where every public place, from streets to supermarkets to parks to restaurants to schools, is nothing more than a gun battle waiting to happen, people are going to recoil in disgust. And to repeat, that includes lots of people who own guns.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 21, 2012
“Willy Nilly Nonsense”: Mitch McConnell Doesn’t Understand What The Debt Ceiling Is
Now that Republicans have pretty much resigned themselves to the idea that there is going to be some kind of tax increase for the wealthy, they’re comforting themselves with the idea that come early next year, they’ll still be able to re-enact the lovely conflict we had over the debt ceiling in 2011 and hold the American economy hostage to their demands. President Obama has quite sensibly said that we ought to just get rid of the debt ceiling itself, since it serves no purpose and allows a party to engage in just this kind of economic blackmail if it’s desperate and cynical enough. So Republicans are pushing back, none more so than Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. But in the process, McConnell has revealed that he has no idea how the debt ceiling actually works.
What McConnell has been saying is that if we eliminate the debt ceiling, it will give the president all kinds of new powers, to spend money willy-nilly however he wants to, run up the debt, and generally become a kind of fiscal dictator. Yesterday he said about the prospect of eliminating the debt ceiling, “I don’t think that there’s any sentiment whatsoever for giving the President perpetual authority without congressional involvement.” And last week in a speech on the Senate floor, he said this:
By demanding the power to raise the debt limit whenever he wants by as much as he wants, he showed what he’s really after is assuming unprecedented power to spend taxpayer dollars without any limit. This isn’t about getting a handle on deficits or debt for him. It’s about spending even more than he already is. Why else would he demand the power to raise the debt limit on his own? And by the way, why on earth would we even consider giving a President who’s brought us four years of trillion dollar deficits unchecked authority to borrow – he’s the last person who should have limitless borrowing power.
Wow, that really would be terrible, if the president had “unprecedented power to spend taxpayer dollars without any limit,” with “unchecked authority to borrow.” The only trouble is that eliminating the debt ceiling does nothing of the sort. In case you’ve forgotten your fourth-grade civics, Congress sets the budget, not the president. The president can’t spend a dollar that Congress doesn’t appropriate. He can’t borrow a dollar that Congress hasn’t said he should borrow. When we reach the debt limit and then go past it, it isn’t because of anything the president has done, it’s because of the budget Congress has written. The reason we take on debt is because federal spending, set by Congress, exceeds federal tax revenues, also set by Congress. The only thing the debt ceiling does is require Congress to have what is in effect an additional vote on their own budget. Eliminating the debt ceiling doesn’t give the president one iota more authority or power. What it does, however, is take away the power the Republicans now have to use blackmail to achieve their policy goals.
OK, so I was kidding when I said Mitch McConnell doesn’t know how the debt ceiling works. He knows exactly how it works. But he also knows that most Americans know next to nothing about it, and he knows that reporters will dutifully pass on whatever he says about it, without adding the appropriate disclaimer that would make their reporting about this topic accurate.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 12, 2012
“Conservatives Get Glum”: Republican Are Very Worried About Whether They Can Break Out Of Its Fox Bubble
A look around the web today makes clear that the crisis of American conservatism in general, and conservatives’ relationship to the media in particular, is clearly our topic. First, none other than William Kristol, the very axis about whom the Republican establishment spins, is extremely worried about what has become of his movement:
And the conservative movement—a bulwark of American strength for the last several decades—is in deep disarray. Reading about some conservative organizations and Republican campaigns these days, one is reminded of Eric Hoffer’s remark, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” It may be that major parts of American conservatism have become such a racket that a kind of refounding of the movement as a cause is necessary. A reinvigoration of the Republican party also seems desirable, based on a new generation of leaders, perhaps coming—as did Ike and Reagan—from outside the normal channels.
There are elements of that racket on both sides of the aisle, but conservatives are particularly adept at fleecing their own people. Part of the problem the conservative movement faces now is that they’ve given so much power to media figures like Rush Limbaugh and the crew at Fox News, but those people’s primary interest is in making money, not in helping the GOP. Which is why Buzzfeed’s McKay Coppins finds a bunch of Republican operatives who are very worried about whether their party can break out of its Fox bubble, both as a psychological and practical matter. Here’s my favorite part:
One Republican official recalled working earlier this year to get a potentially damaging story about a Democratic candidate into The New York Times — only to have an impatient colleague leak the scoop to a conservative website. The story shot through the online right, but failed to gain mainstream traction.
“I was like, great, we made the people who were already voting for us even angrier,” the official snarked to BuzzFeed. “Mission accomplished.”
Obviously, the politicians can start speaking more through non-conservative media outlets on their own initiative; John Boehner can just decide that he’ll do Meet the Press and Face the Nation, not just Fox News Sunday (and the idea that he’d get impossibly difficult questions on the first two is laughable). But might the conservative media themselves ask whether they can do anything to broaden their audience’s perspective so they don’t create such a reality-denying bubble? Harold Pollack, hoping against hope that there are people on the right as reasonable and fair-minded as he is, urges them to come up with their own version of MSNBC’s Up With Chris Hayes, a program that would feature lengthy, substantive, interesting discussions between people who actually know things, as opposed to just “strategists” trading talking points:
What strikes me is the dearth of conservative-leaning shows built on the same model. Most FOX discussion shows are virtually unwatchable—not because they’re conservative, but because they offer so little intellectual nutrition to their core audience. Sticking to our home topic of health policy, legitimate conservative experts such as James Capretta and Tevi Troy are drowned out by less honest or reputable figures such as Betsy McCaughey and Dick Morris. The typical conservative FOX viewer is thus fed Pravda-style misleading information about what the Affordable Care Act really entails. The typical non-conservative FOX viewer—to the extent non-conservatives tune in at all—have no way of knowing what reputable Republican or conservative policy analysts are really thinking, or, indeed, who these experts really are.
The first thing you’d need for such a program to be created is an audience that would watch it. After all, MSNBC doesn’t air Hayes’ show as a public service. The people who produce the show are trying to create the best program they can, but the network’s bottom line is its bottom line. If it wasn’t making money, it would get cancelled (the show’s ratings are pretty good if not spectacular).
That doesn’t mean, however, that every potentially lucrative market niche is exploited. There might well be an audience waiting for more intelligent conservative programming, but as long as Fox is still the number-one cable news network (which they are) and is making money hand over fist (ditto), there’s little reason for them to go looking to change what is for them an extremely successful formula. And don’t forget that a Democratic president is great for their business; it gives them an endless supply of things to get mad about, which means more viewers.
Since the conservative media is unlikely to change, maybe there’s little people on the right can do but wait around, as Kristol says, for a new generation of leadership to come along and change things.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 11, 2012
“Unbridled Hypocisy”: Laura Ingraham Has the World’s Worst Imagination
Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham is outraged — outraaaged! — that President Obama met with some MSNBC anchors at the White House on Tuesday, according to her daily newsletter:
“Rachel Maddow, Al Sharpton, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Ed Schultz all stopped by the White House to discuss the President’s fiscal cliff proposal. Can anyone even imagine how the press would have reacted if Fox News hosts and conservative personalities had stopped by the Bush White House to discuss policy? They would have been rightly outraged.”
Yes, let’s all put on our imagination hats and try as hard as we can to imagine what that meeting would look like. George W. Bush would be seated in an Oval Office chair, doing jazz hands in front of a bust of Winston Churchill. On his left, Fox News host Sean Hannity would be pensively smelling his hand on a couch with conservative personality Michael Medved. On his right, conservative personalities Neil Boortz and Mike Gallagher would be sharing another couch. And, just for imagination’s sake, let’s put conservative personality Laura Ingraham in there, too, right next to the president. Now, obviously, such a scene never actually transpired, but — wait, what? Oh. It did.
After Media Matters revealed Ingraham’s hypocrisy to the world, a producer responded with the classic “Ingraham didn’t actually write the newsletter, and also, the two things are totally different because I said so” defense.
During Laura’s brief radio hiatus, the Daily Fix is written by staff. Although I didn’t know Laura had visited the Bush White House with other conservative radio hosts, the circumstances of her meeting the president were quite different. Laura did not go to the White House to advise the president, but was simply briefed on policy for perhaps an hour.
For what it’s worth, the MSNBC hosts didn’t “advise” Obama. They were, uh, briefed on policy:
“This afternoon at the White House, the President met with influential progressives to talk about the importance of preventing a tax increase on middle class families, strengthening our economy and adopting a balanced approach to deficit reduction,” Earnest said in a statement Tuesday.
As embarrassing as this whole episode is for Team Ingraham, they’re not the only ones who should have done a little research before going into full fauxtrage mode about the MSNBC meeting. Take the hosts of Fox & Friends (please!), for example, who overreacted in typical fashion. “I’m shocked by that,” Brian Kilmeade said. “To invite five talk show hosts in, all from the same channel? That’s outrageous.” Mike Huckabee, who has a show on Fox News, claimed yesterday that the sit-down with Obama destroyed any “illusion whatsoever that there’s objectivity going on at MSNBC.”
By: Dan Amira, Daily Intel, December 6, 2012
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