mainstream media

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The Mainstream Media Notices Gun Bloggers

November 28, 2011 by

This weekend, the New York Times and the Arizona Republic, two papers on opposite ends of the country, featured stories in which gun bloggers played a role. To see this much recognition paid to gun bloggers by major newspapers is frankly amazing. I don’t think I’d be overstating things if I said that most in the media consider us gun bloggers as crazy fringe types ranting about gun rights, the Constitution, and the Second Amendment or posting about arcane topics such as the difference between .308 Winchester and 7.62 NATO.

The New York Times’s lead story in their Sunday Business section was about Cerberus and the Freedom Group. In a rather straightforward story, Times reporter Natasha Singer described how financier Stephen Feinberg, CEO of Cerberus, created what has become the Freedom Group of companies starting with Bushmaster and then adding icons such as Remington, Marlin, and Harrington and Richardson to the mix. The story details their place in the market, the relative lack of handguns in their product mix, and how this last factor could impact Freedom Group’s growth as concealed carry expands.

It is in the discussion of the growth of Freedom Group that gun bloggers are mentioned.

Still, the Freedom Group has ingested so many well-known brands so quickly that some gun owners are uneasy about what it might do next. Two years ago, a Cerberus managing director, George Kollitides, ran for the board of the N.R.A. Despite an endorsement from Remington, and the fact that he was a director of the Freedom Group and Remington, he lost. His campaign didn’t sit well with some gun bloggers, who viewed him as an industry interloper.

Andrew Arulanandam, the N.R.A.’s director for public affairs, declined to speculate about why Mr. Kollitides lost. “It’s a great question to ask our four million members,” he said.

The gun bloggers mentioned in the story are Sebastian and Bitter of Shall Not Be Questioned. It links to their 2009 endorsements for the NRA Board of Directors where they discussed why they were not endorsing George Kollitides.

The Arizona Republic featured a front page story today entitled “ATF gun probe: Behind the fall of Operation Fast and Furious.” The story by Dennis Wagner is one of the better overviews of Operation Fast and Furious and does a good job at outlining the scandal. It is even better at bringing to light the behind-the scenes moves that brought this scandal to public consciousness. As Wagner notes,

The initial story line of Fast and Furious was about outrage — anger that guns, let out of sight, had been used in crimes. But the backstory of the investigation is one of hidden motives, curious contradictions and strange allegiances, both among those who organized the effort and those who exposed it.

It goes into detail on how Senior Agent John Dodson sought out the advice of ATF veterans Jay Dobyns and Vincent Cefalu who eventually began to network with bloggers David Codrea and Mike Vanderboegh.

Dobyns and Cefalu began networking with two of the most prominent and prolific Second Amendment bloggers in America.

David Codrea, an Ohio-based writer, is field editor for GUNS Magazine and an author on a website known as “The War on Guns: Notes From the Resistance.”

Mike Vanderboegh runs a website, Sipsey Street Irregulars, which he identifies as a gathering place for the 3 percent of Americans willing to fight for the right to bear arms.

Vanderboegh and Codrea, longtime friends, this year received Soldier of Fortune Magazine’s Second Amendment Freedom Award and the David and Goliath Award from Jews for Preservation of Firearms Ownership.

Dobyns says he turned to the bloggers because of a shared animus toward ATF administrators. “Do they have an agenda? Of course they do,” he said. “But it’s my experience that they’re not anti-ATF; they’re anti-bad ATF.”

Codrea and Vanderboegh began churning out essays on Fast and Furious, even giving the operation its sardonic nickname, “Project Gunwalker.” They joined forces with other bloggers, government employees and gun dealers in what Vanderboegh calls “a coalition of willing Lilliputians.”

The story recognizes the role that Codrea and Vanderboegh played as intermediaries between the whistleblowers and Congressional staffers. Indeed, it was their pressure that got people like Sen. Chuck Grassley to pay attention to the whistleblowers and give them protection. It also makes note of how improbable it was that a pair of Threepers got together with the ATF whistleblowers.

In interviews, Vanderbeogh and Codrea chuckle at the irony of government agents relying on their critics to find a congressional audience.

“It’s so improbable that ATF guys would come to us, the Second Amendment advocates,” Vanderbeogh says. “But we realized we did have common enemies in the ATF hierarchy.”

I am glad to see gun bloggers get their due in both stories. It is about time.

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Garbage In, Garbage Out

October 17, 2011 by

CBS News is reporting that a study from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that President Obama had gotten more negative media coverage than any other 2012 presidential candidate over the past five months.

Pew found that Mr. Obama was the subject of negative assessments nearly four times as often as he was the subject of positive assessments. It found he received “positive” coverage nine percent of the time, “neutral” coverage 57 percent of the time and “negative” coverage 34 percent of the time.

Pardon me if I am skeptical of this study and of their definition of media. It claims to have drawn from over 11,500 news outlets “including local and national broadcasts, news websites and blogs.”

The study used the amount of attention a candidate received and the “tone of that coverage.” They put the tone into positive, neutral, and negative categories. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, they used the following methodology.

To assess the tone of coverage, PEJ researchers then employed computer algorithmic software from Crimson Hexagon. Researchers conducted a tone analysis and then “trained” the algorithm to follow the same rules as they had themselves. PEJ also conducted inter-coder tests to ensure the computer coding was replicable and valid by comparing human coding to the results derived by the algorithm. The project also had different people build the algorithms separately to ensure that they were achieving consistent results. Each computer algorithm was then additionally tested for reliability by having multiple researchers review the content assessed and the results.

The tone analysis was conducted on two different samples. The first was of the coverage and commentary on more than 11,500 news outlets, based on their RSS feeds. While the content is text based, the material on various television news sites often closely resembled the stories that had aired on television, and in some cases were exact transcripts. The second was from hundreds of thousands of blogs. (Facebook and Twitter feeds were not included after researchers found that the political assessment offered there was typically quite brief or referred to blog or news content.)

Anytime you use a computer algorithm, it is susceptible to tampering and tweaking regardless of the so-called safeguards that the researchers supposedly employed. It goes back to that old saying about computers, if you put garbage in, you’ll get garbage out.

The study does acknowledge that blogs are more critical of candidates than other new media outlets. This I would believe. However, the general results from this study lump blogs in with the rest of the media. In relation to the coverage of Obama, this will tend to raise the negatives while hiding the generally uncritical reporting on Obama by the mainstream media. Digging deeper into this study, you find that blogs on both ends of the political spectrum are harsher towards Obama than the news media in general. However, the study does not include a similar breakout for the mainstream media like they do for blogs. In other words, you cannot compare the tone of coverage given by blogs with that of the mainstream media.

Reports such as these that “show” more negative coverage of Obama lets the mainstream media get away with their fawning and generally uncritical reporting on him. If the mainstream media were actually taking a negative approach towards Obama, you would see in-depth, critical stories hammering his administration over Project Gunwalker. As it is, you have Sharyl Attkisson at CBS, William LaJeunesse at Fox, and sometimes Richard Solarno at the LA Times writing about it. The New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CNN, ABC, and the rest of the elite media would just as soon not write about Project Gunwalker. They’d rather focus on the astro-turfed Occupy Wall Street nonsense.

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And They Wonder Why Gun Owners Are Wary Of The Media

September 16, 2011 by 6 Comments

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle had a story about new lawsuits filed against the City of San Francisco. These lawsuits challenge a city requirement that handguns must be kept either in a locked container or have trigger lock and a city ban on the sale of hollow-point ammunition. With regard to the latter, reporter Rachel Gordon wrote:

The other, which has been on the books in various forms since 1994, prohibits the sale of hollow-point bullets and similar ammunition that fragments or explodes upon impact.

Hollow-point ammunition does not explode nor fragment upon impact. It opens up, becomes wider, and is designed to stop the bad guy without passing through and hurting an innocent bystander. That is why most police officers are issued such ammunition. The only ammunition that fragments upon impact is frangible ammunition which is designed that way to prevent pass throughs or ricochets at a shooting range. Even then, it only comes apart when it hits a hard object like a target backstop.

The only “exploding” ammo I’ve ever read about was in Frederick Forsyth’s Day of the Jackel where the assassin had special ammo made with a drop of mercury in a sealed bullet.

Jeez!

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Quote Of The Day No. 2

September 13, 2011 by 1 Comment

Kurt Hofmann, the St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner, takes the mainstream media to task over their continued characterization of Operation Fast and Furious as “botched gun sting”. His article titled, “Let’s be clear–the only thing ‘botched’ in ‘Project Gunwalker’ was the cover-up”, examines why the operation was never about tracking guns. He concludes:

To allow the characterization of “Project Gunwalker” as a “botched sting operation” to go unchallenged is to give the perpetrators near (or at?) the very top of the Obama government a free pass on the utter evil of this monstrosity, and allow “gun control” apologists to blame it on desperation stemming from “weak U.S. gun laws,” because of the “gun lobby.”

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Misplaced Priorities

June 16, 2011 by 2 Comments

Unless you have been in a cave, the lead story in the news for the past couple of weeks as reported by the mainstream media has been about this man.

He is in the news because he was an idiot. He is married but sent a picture of his crotch to some female “admirer” living in the Seattle area. He thought it was going out privately but he sent it by Twitter.

You have heard very little in the so-called major media about this man who died in service to our country.

The first man is, of course, now-former Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY). I won’t bore you with the details except to say he is a narcissist and an idiot. The second man is U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry who was killed in Rio Rico, Arizona while on stake-out intercepting illegal aliens and drug smugglers. It is likely that he was killed with a firearm that was allowed to “walk” under an ATF operation called Fast and Furious.

The media has been following the Weiner story 24 hours a day, 7 days a week since it broke. As to Project Gunwalker and Operation Fast and Furious, only Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News and William LaJeunesse of FoxNews have been reporting on it. It has been virtually ignored by ABC News, NBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

Let’s think about this for a minute. The first episode involves sexting, virtual cheating, and stupidity on the part of a venal man. The second episode involves a Federal agency who some believe – and I include myself – engaged in an operation who’s major purpose was to build support for new gun control laws. That operation involved straw purchases, subversion of their agency’s sworn duty, and allowing smuggling of guns into another sovereign nation in violation of that country’s laws. Two Federal law enforcement officers are now dead as well as an estimated 150 or more Mexican citizens thanks to the use of these “walked” firearms in the hands of the narco-terrorists.

What the hell is wrong with the mainstream media in this country that they virtually ignore a scandal that surpasses Iran-Contra and may border on Watergate to concentrate their efforts on a former darling of the Left who screwed up? The only thing hurt by Weiner was his family, his reputation, and his pride.

As I said, misplaced priorities.

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Roundup Of Mainstream Media Reports On Project Gunwalker

March 4, 2011 by 1 Comment

After Sharyl Attkisson’s first report for CBS News on Project Gunwalker, the mainstream media yawned. However, after last night’s report which featured Sr. Agent John Dodson on camera and on the record, the mainstream media has started to wake up. I should clarify that last statement – some of the mainstream media are starting to wake up.

It is still a non-story to the New York Times. At the Washington Post, despite their big investigation into “The Secret Life of Guns” earlier this year, all they saw fit to do was reprint a story from the LA Times.

The Los Angeles Times, however, is reporting on the story in conjunction with Center for Public Integrity.
As part of the story they interviewed Sen. Chuck Grassley who has this to say:

“We still don’t have the documents we’ve asked for. Maybe we will get the documents. But right now it’s stonewalling,” Grassley said in an interview Thursday.

“Too many government agencies always want the big case,” he said. “They keep these gun-running sales moving along, even when they have people within the agency that say something bad’s going to happen. They had plenty of warnings … and the prophets turned out to be right.”

The rest of the LA Times story covered ground that was previously tilled by bloggers and CBS News. Nonetheless, it is important that a major newspaper has come out with the story.

What makes the involvement of the Center for Public Integrity so interesting is that they are a recipient of funding from the Joyce Foundation to develop stories on the “gun industry lobby.” However, given the hard-hitting nature of their latest report here  along with their assistance to the LA Times, I don’t think the Joyce Foundation can be too happy.

The Dallas Morning News ran an editorial on it as the investigation on gun walking has expanded to stores in Texas. Even CNN has a story out on Project Gunwalker this afternoon with extensive reporting of the Grassley investigation.

Fox News is covering it as well. They brought in Judge Andrew Napolitano, their senior judicial analyst, for his thoughts on it. He makes a good point that to really get to the bottom of this the investigation must be done by Congress and it must be in the House. A multi-agency review conducted out of the Department of Justice most likely will result in a whitewash and a Senate investigation could be hindered by the Democratic majority. Whether the House Judiciary Committee will take it up – and has the cojones to see the investigation through – is anybody’s guess.