ANALYSIS: Something alarming is happening within the so-called “legacy media,” and it just might underscore the belief among conservatives and especially American gun owners that the press has strayed far from being a watchdog on government to having become more of a cheerleader, especially when liberal Democrats are in control and strive to turn Second Amendment rights into government-regulated privileges.
Earlier this month, the Seattle Times editorial board threw support behind Senate Bill 5400, a measure which would create a tax surcharge on large search engines and social media platforms. According to the Times editorial, this surcharge would be aimed at taxing “a small portion of the value they derive from trustworthy news content.”
Here’s a newspaper which routinely uses the term “gun violence”—a creation of the gun prohibition lobby to demonize firearms; one never reads about “knife violence” or “blunt instrument violence” when covering other forms of murder—and has an assistant managing editor for diversity, inclusion and staff development, who is also the newspaper’s “social justice columnist.”
Indeed, terms and phrases appearing regularly in legacy media news columns come straight from the gun prohibition lobby’s lexicon. How often do the terms “gun reform,” “gun safety group,” “assault weapons,” and/or “gun responsibility” show up in news reports?
Like many other newspapers, the Times has habitually not been friendly to the Second Amendment, and instead has supported essentially every restrictive gun control policy to come out of the Democrat-controlled legislature in Olympia.
Skip to the “other Washington,” where the Washington Post recently “eliminated its sports department as part of sweeping layoffs that cut more than 300 jobs between sports and international reporting,” as described by the Miami Hurricane. Sports journalism is a big thing for most newspapers, but how many remaining daily newspapers serving major metropolitan hubs have a solid outdoors section, where consumptive hunting and fishing are the mainstay topics (and haven’t been replaced by cross-country skiing, hiking, climbing, bicycling and/or seasonal camping)?
When was the last time anyone read a pro-Second Amendment editorial, representing the newspaper’s position, in the WaPo (or the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Portland Oregonian, Chicago Tribune or the Boston Herald) which told its readers that “shall not be infringed” means exactly what it says?
It might come as a long-overdue shock to the WaPo’s current far-left audience, which did not react well when billionaire owner Jeff Bezos last fall pulled the newspaper’s all-too-predictable endorsement of Kamala Harris, “chasing off 250,000 subscribers and starting an exodus of more than 100 Post journalists,” according to a column by Bryan Curtis at The Ringer.
It is no secret that daily newspapers have been suffering in recent times. Loss of revenue from advertising, which has shifted to online (and relatively inexpensive) circulation, and competition from a growing variety of “independent” forms of journalism, which increasingly offers a different slant on news, frequently more conservative. Many, if not most, of these newspapers have been hemorrhaging subscribers, while the publishers and editorial boards scratch their heads, wondering why.
Curtis, editor at The Ringer, overlooked the fact that newspapers, by constantly using the First Amendment to attack the Second Amendment have been “chasing off” subscribers for a couple of generations.
Putting it bluntly in an economic sense, nobody is going to keep paying to read how their fundamental right is wrong for the country, and how they are evidently so untrustworthy that they should be subjected to “expanded background checks,” waiting periods, one-gun-a-month purchasing and limits on the amount of ammunition they can buy.
At the same time, nobody will subscribe to a publication which ignores, or simply provides intermittent lip service to their lifestyles and interests.
Apparently, editors and accountants at newspapers big and small missed the journalism school lesson about alienating their subscribers. It is not a new phenomenon.
Back in October 2017, writing at the Columbia Journalism Review, Ben Hallman—then deputy editor at The Trace and before that an editor at the HuffPost—made this candid observation: “Reporters…frame stories in ways that make it clear they see gun-owning Americans—roughly 22 percent of people in the US—as distinctly other.”
Eleven months later, writing at The Journalists Resource in September 2018, Denise-Marie Ordway referred to a study by Doug Downs, then an associate professor at Montana State University. Downs had “analyzed newspaper articles, editorials and letters to the editor from 31 major newspapers in the U.S. and Canada.” According to Ordway, this is what Downs discovered: “Gun owners often ‘are explicitly or implicitly characterized as selfish, incompetent, and irresponsible, caring more about guns than people.’”
He reportedly also found newsrooms were “silencing perspectives on gun ownership that would show it more favorably than do the frames of a cosmopolitan worldview.”
This raises the question no editorial board would ever likely answer without dismissive sarcasm: If 250,000 subscribers quit the Washington Post over the Harris endorsement withdrawal, how many potential readers in northern Virginia, Maryland and Delaware have closed their wallets over a steady diet of gun control advocacy?
How many readers have newspapers in Washington, California, Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico and other states lost because their newsrooms have essentially turned a blind eye to the interests of those former subscribers?
If newspapers across the country are suffering loss of readers, and a downturn in advertising as a result, can at least part of the problem be the media’s attitude toward American gun owners? It is a fair question, but don’t expect a candid answer.
Those disdained gun owners and outdoorsmen and women are not illiterate bumpkins, and they have discerned a growing cultural divide between the newsrooms and the firearms community. They can read rather well, and what they’ve been reading in newspapers for decades has pushed them to drop subscriptions, boycott advertisers and turn their attention to alternate, independent journalism, where they at least feel they’re getting a fair shake.
It may be too late for legacy newspapers, and broadcast news, to turn things around. And once these news agencies turn to government for financial support, they stop being independent and start being mouthpieces.
Committed Gun-Grabbers Claim to Support the Second Amendment
ATF Reverses Course After Denying NFA Applications for Wanting to “Exercise God-Given Rights”
About Dave Workman
Workman is an award-winning career journalist and outdoor writer whose Op-Eds have appeared in newspapers in Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta and elsewhere. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Communications/Editorial Journalism from the University of Washington, and is currently editor-in-chief at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press.
from https://ift.tt/Dk7RYv6
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment