The mainstream media is no friend to the modern gun owner.
Everywhere you turn, there is some report in the media touting the latest Everytown- or Brady-funded study that shockingly finds gun control works. They’re never critical of these studies and never seek out a disagreeing opinion, but that changes when the study finds something to the contrary.
Editorials throughout the nation tout gun control as the answer to our problems.
Our modern media is heavily biased in favor of gun control. And it seems one op-ed argues that the problem is that at least one newspaper should be more heavily based against the Second Amendment.
Actually, the first time the AJC’s editorial commentary on a shooting issue made me think of McGill was on May 3, 2023. That was the day after the mid-day shooting at a Midtown Atlanta medical office building that left one person dead and three others wounded. The AJC devoted its entire front page to a powerful editorial that ran under the byline of Andrew Morse, the paper’s president and publisher. “We don’t have to live in fear of visiting the doctor, or taking a trip to the supermarket, or sending our children to school,” Morse wrote. “We don’t have to duck and cover. Our children don’t have to participate in lockdown drills…”
Morse was wrong, of course. We’ve had to do all those things, and still do. But he took a good first stab at putting a bright spotlight on the issue—and holding Gov. Brian Kemp and the General Assembly accountable for state laws that allowed the midtown shooting.
Good, I thought. Maybe they’re summoning their inner McGill. If they keep it up, if they subject Kemp and others to daily opprobrium, if they make it clear that the blood of Midtown is on the hands of Kemp and his General Assembly allies, maybe it will do some good. But they didn’t. Nearly as I can determine, Morse’s editorial was a one-and-done.
…
I realize that the nature of the media and the power of the press has changed a great deal since McGill’s day, but the AJC is still uniquely positioned to hold Kemp, Ginn and their fellow Second Amendment advocates to account for deaths and injuries that might not have happened but for the laws they enacted. It’s time for the AJC to rouse McGill’s ghost, reopen Column One, and subject Kemp and company to a daily dose of the First Amendment. One-and-done won’t get the job done.
Now, the AJC has run numerous biased stories through the years, all pushing the gun control narrative. Editorials might not have been a constant thing, but the overall tone of the paper is one that isn’t friendly to the right to keep and bear arms.
And as a result, a lot of people have absolutely no use for the state’s largest paper.
But let’s say the AJC and other papers do precisely what the author wants. They put an anti-gun column on the front page of the paper literally every day. Then what?
After a time, people are going to get sick of seeing it and stop reading it entirely. Most people access their news online and can skip stories even more easily. While the AJC is paying someone to be an anti-gun activist, they’ll be bleeding readership, at least of that column, because while people are upset about Apalachee High, and rightly so, their interest in gun control will wane.
A column focused on just one topic only appeals to those interested in that one topic, which means preaching to the choir at best.
Yet if AJC does this, can they really claim neutrality in covering literally anything else? When they cover gun politics, there will always be the knowledge of where the paper officially stands. Everything they do will be seen through the lens of that bias. It’ll be impossible for them to report any gun-related story accurately without some doubt cast over whether they’re overstating things to advance a narrative.
I mean, it’s already like that, but it’ll be a hundred times worse.
This writer has been a journalist and the fact that he doesn’t see why what he’s talking about is beyond stupid tells you a lot about the state of the profession in this day and age.
