Every Journalist for Gun “Safety”—The Phoenix Story

Posted on by DRGO
BloombergandMuppet_embig

Michael Bloomberg and a Muppet (Sesame Workshop)

Should journalists be required to disclose conflicts of interest? If my profession is any guide, it would be good medicine for them, but they seem to think they are exempt from such mundane details. Every medical journal article and every educational conference speaker slot is festooned with the doctors’ disclosures of any money, services, perks, or anything else they might have received in connection with their professional activity. If your family doctor attends a lunch conference on the latest heart drug and accepts so much as a cheap ball point pen from a drug rep she is instantly discredited as a tool of Big Pharma.

So what in the world was up in Phoenix last weekend, with Columbia University’s surrealistically named Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma? The center held a conference to “offer independent expert briefings and specialized reporting skills training to enhance the practical ability of journalists to report on guns and gun violence knowledgeably, ethically and effectively.” That’s fine, since mainstream media journalists have long maintained a separate reality about guns and gun owners, almost taking pride in their ignorance.

The problem arose with the awkward fact that the whole affair was bought and paid for by Michael Bloomberg’s latest AstroTurf gun ban group, the Orwellianly-named Everytown for Gun Safety. One wonders what the mainstream media reaction would have been if the benefactor had been the National Rifle Association or the National Shooting Sports Foundation. Thundering outrage, perhaps?

But apparently being a prominent journalism school sponsored by a super-wealthy gun control advocate is suitable inoculation against unpleasant mainstream media queries about conflict of interest.

Advertised as a regional workshop “for reporters, editors, news directors, photographers, producers, and bloggers,” in reality the workshop’s invited panel was heavily weighted toward academic or media figures with well-established anti-gun rights credentials. Heading the list was Roseanna Ander, former official of the Joyce Foundation, the leading funder (after the taxpayers, that is) of gun control advocacy research. Her job there was to oversee Joyce’s Gun Violence program, giving out $3.3 million annually for anti-gun advocacy research.

Other Dart Center-selected panelists were Philip Cook, the Duke University criminologist whose findings always seem to condemn gun ownership, Mother Jones editor Mark Follman, whose misleading anti-gun rights rabble-rousing has been exposed in another post, and University of California emergency physician Garen Wintemute, who has made a career of smearing gun owners under the guise of medical research. Wintemute’s work has been funded in part by the Joyce Foundation (see panelist Roseanna Ander, above).

The two token pro-gun panelists were long-time firearms law expert and author David Kopel and conservative journalist S. E. Cupp. Even the intellectual firepower brought by Kopel, whose opinions have been cited by the Supreme Court, wasn’t enough to counter the panel’s heavily anti-gun rights bias.

Certain bloggers, academics, and law enforcement officers were not welcome, as gun blogger Dean Weingarten found out (thanks to Dean for recommending me as a panelist). In correspondence with the Dart Center he recommended balancing the panel with prominent experts on the other side of the gun rights debate. Respected criminologist and firearm researcher John Lott, PhD was well-qualified, as was noted investigative journalist and author Sharyl Attkisson. She has firsthand knowledge of reporting on national issues of gun policy. Dr. Brian Anse Patrick is a professor of communication at the University of Toledo who has written extensively about journalistic treatment of firearm policy. He could have brought a generous fund of knowledge to the party.

As for a famously popular law enforcement officer, the Dart Center couldn’t have done better than to put Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke on their panel of experts. But that choice would likely have been nixed, since Sheriff Clarke is a strong advocate of concealed carry of firearms by honest citizens for their self-protection. And the fact that Dart Center benefactor Michael Bloomberg spent $150,000 to try to thwart Clarke’s election last year probably didn’t boost his chances of appearing on the Dart Center panel.

Some of the panelists’ and participants’ reactions can be viewed on Twitter at the hashtag #CoveringGuns. A few of them follow. Click on the tweet to see my tweeted reply to some of the tweets:

Jennifer Longdon is a Phoenix-area gun control activist.  

Marc Cooper is billed as a journalist and gun owner in this tweet.

Mark Follman is the Mother Jones editor mentioned above. 

Adam Roy is a web journalist who apparently has a lot to learn about firearms. Too bad he didn’t learn it at this conference, but I hope I steered him in the right direction.

Journalists who tell the story with as little bias as they can should command our great respect. We are all human, and no informed person can be free of bias. But journalists should be held to a high standard of truth. They should keep their opinions on the editorial page and let readers and viewers parse the facts for themselves on the news pages.

Instead, spokespersons for the traditional media (read big-city newspapers and most major networks) are on a mission. They assume an anti-gun rights perspective as the norm in America and proceed from that perspective in their supposedly straight news reporting. Perhaps that’s why the promoters of last weekend’s conference could maintain with a straight face that it was not biased. Even as billionaire gun-grabber Michael Bloomberg picked up the tab.

 

Dr. Tim Wheeler

—Timothy Wheeler, MD is director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Second Amendment Foundation.

All DRGO articles by Timothy Wheeler, MD.