Shooting Blind

Press coverage of the "assault weapon" controversy suggests that most jounalists know very little about gunsand are not interested in learning.

William R. Tonso from the November 1995 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Journalists have long maintained that they keep their personal views in check when they engage in reporting as opposed to commentary. But some prominent journalists are no longer trying to maintain that fiction when covering the gun issue. Where guns are concerned, it seems, they seek only premise-supporting evidence. And big journalism's working premise is that the battle over gun control pits the American public, its police protectors, and its responsible representatives, aided by neutral researchers and the watchdog press, against the "gun lobby," headed by the NRA and repre senting no more than the gun industry and other irresponsible vested interests.

Thus in 1989 Bill Peters, correspondent for Los Angeles's ABC-owned station, told the U.S. Senate that "today it is our [journalists'] responsibilityusing all the powerful means we have at our disposal...both to inform the public of the danger to society posed by military assault rifles and to help build support for getting rid of them." Gloria Hammond, of Time's editorial office, informed readers who complained of bias in that magazine's July 17, 1989, cover story on guns that "the time for opinions on the dangers of gun availability is long since gone, replaced by overwhelming evi dence that it represents a growing threat to public safety."

Thomas Winship, a former editor of the Boston Globe who now chairs the Center for Foreign Journalists in Reston, Virginia, called for a newspaper crusade against guns in his April 24, 1993, Editor & Publisher column. He urged editors, who he assumed share his anti-gun views, to "investi gate the NRA with renewed vigor....Print names of elected officials who take NRA funds....Support all forms of gun licensing; in fact all the causes NRA opposes."

Back in 1988, Josh Sugarmann accurately read big journalism. He and his friends did not have to worry that skeptical, hard-hitting reporting would discredit their cause. When it comes to gun control, big journalism is little more than a purveyor of the conventional wisdom among urban sophisticates who have only a selective appreciation for the Bill of Rights.