Kudos to - most - of the press for it's handling of Uvalde
With a couple of glaring instances of avoidance
I want to give kudos to the national press corps.
In the wake of the massacre of 19 children and two of their teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, the press has conveyed a sense of outrage in their reporting.
First there was the crying. Morgan Chesky for NBC was having trouble keeping his voice from breaking as he was on the scene reporting on Tuesday as events were unfolding.
Stephanie Ruhle - who hosts what is fast becoming my favorite show on cable - could barely get through “The 11th Hour” without breaking up; no more so than when she was interviewing Nicole Hockley, whose son, Dylan, was killed at Sandy Hook. Ruhle called Hockley a friend, and told the audience that she had known her for 10 years - since she was covering Sandy Hook - and wishes they had never met.
The next day at the Washington Post, reporter Hannah Jewell and her colleagues put together a video elucidating the facts of gun violence. They included all child gun deaths - not just from mass shootings.
Here’s one of the facts: “The U.S. is an outlier. In 2019 there were 29 times as many children under 5 shot and killed in America… compared to other high-income countries.”
The facts speak volumes, but in other times, most news organizations would have avoided pointing out facts that made one of our political “sides” uncomfortable. This seemed to have been tossed aside as reporters in the U.S. finally gave in to their exasperation at constantly being lied to.
That refusal to stay on script is what made Texas Senator Ted Cruz angry when Sky News reporter Mark Stone pressed him on why gun violence on this scale only happens in America. Cruz tried every talking point in his playbook, then lost his cool and seemed to have stuck his finger - repeatedly - into Stone’s chest.
OK, “cool” may be a subjective word. There is nothing about Ted Cruz that is cool. Also, am I the only one who was creeped out by Cruz’ pronunciation of the word “kiss”? It felt and sounded like an old, lascivious uncle.
As much as I hate the gaggle of press that forms at these things, all trying to outdo each other for asking the best “gotcha” question, the gaggle in Uvalde (staying in motor homes near the school) seems to have supported each other in asking real questions - like “why didn’t police breach the classroom” and “why do Texas officials keep lying to us?”
The police failure narrative is a great example of holding truth to power, and paying attention to detail. It also exposes a kind of smugness among the white men in power who thought that journalists would slavishly report the “police as heroes” story.
So, yay. After the election of Donald Trump, a lot of journalists seem to have realized they need to push back and push back hard, and let go of “both sides” journalism.
But there were some folks who just couldn’t seem to give up the ghost. One of them was my former shop, Nevada Public Radio, which - after an intro acknowledging the massacre - ran its scheduled talk show on Wednesday about UFOs, rather than lead a live discussion about gun violence, how it has affected Las Vegas, and what was happening in Uvalde.
I criticized this kind of thinking when I was there, and will continue to criticize it.
Then there’s this piece from Glenn Kessler at The Washington Post, which purported to do analysis, but was so contorted trying to be “fair” that it was barely understandable.
Kessler starts with a quote from President Biden noting that shootings went down during the assault weapons ban. But Kessler “balanced” those comments with this quote from Texas Governor Greg Abbott:
“I hate to say this, but there are more people who were shot every weekend in Chicago than there are in schools in Texas.”
Of course, CNN and other news sources totally debunked this. There are, in fact, more shootings in Texas than Chicago. But Kessler, did not debunk it. He palmed these quotes off as Democrats and Republicans “argu(ing) about the effectiveness of gun laws.”
The essence of Kessler’s piece is studious non-commitment. He cites studies that say gun violence - and mass shootings - have risen since the end of the assault weapons and high capacity magazine ban in 2004. But so has population. So you never know.
I can see his point. I mean, China and India have populations that are many multiples of ours. And mass shootings are… Oh wait, they don’t have many mass shootings at all. In fact, while the population did rise in the U.S., the number of guns rose faster. We now have more guns than people in the country.
“The short answer,” Kessler wrote, “is that many proposed laws probably would not have much impact on curbing the mass shootings that dominate the news. But they could lessen their severity, and might also bring down overall gun violence.”
The long answer is even more non-committal.
The 1994 assault weapons ban “was riddled with loopholes,” but by the end of the law, it might have “helped cap and then reduce the supply of assault weapons” and large capacity magazines.
So, really, the problem was that the ban worked, but politicians hobbled it from the beginning by giving it a 10-year sunset? That’s something to explore. Kessler does not.
Kessler also drops this jaw-dropping statistic from one of the studies he cites:
“…compared with the 10-year period before the [assault weapons] ban, the number of gun massacres during the ban period fell by 37 percent and the number of people dying because of mass shootings fell by 43 percent. But after the ban lapsed in 2004, the numbers in the next 10-year period rose sharply — a 183 percent increase in mass shootings and a 239 percent increase in deaths.”
But in the very next sentence, he undermines these statistics: “Correlation does not necessarily equal causation, however.”
It may be the prevalence of guns. It may be the higher rates of alienation. Or the digital divide. Or economic inequality. Or it may not be. We just don’t know. So we can’t do anything.
It’s sort of like walking into a place that’s been broken into because the locks weren’t working properly and saying, “Well, you’re not going to be able to stop break-ins” and walking away, rather than, perhaps, recommending locks that work.
Kessler looks at “proposed laws” or laws that are already in place, forged from political compromise between people who want stronger protections and people who want none. He does not look at what we need, just at how things work or don’t work now.
While assault weapons were banned, Kessler wrote, semi-automatic handguns were not. And lots of shooters used those. And that’s it. No exploration of why that’s the case, how powerful those guns might be, and how to change that.
Why not ban semi-automatic handguns? Why not rate guns on their capacity to do damage to what you shoot them at? Rule of thumb for me: if the weapon you use will pulverize the deer or bird so much that they are inedible, then perhaps we don’t need to sell them.
Kessler writes that states that have curbed the capacity of magazines have lower rates of victims in a mass shooting. But, some people in those states still manage to get high-capacity magazines. Background checks are shown to work, but Dylann Roof got a gun anyway.
And? We shouldn’t then have a federal ban so someone in California can’t just head to Nevada to buy ammo? Or buy their gun from a straw buyer, as the Columbine shooters did? Kessler seems to be parroting the gun lobby’s argument that since some people don’t obey laws, we shouldn’t have them.
I’d much rather see an analysis on what WOULD stop gun crimes - in a mass shooting or with fewer victims. Giving us a contorted shrug of a column doesn’t help advance this conversation.
Of course, talking about UFO’s doesn’t advance the conversation, either.