Do Media Make Mistakes On Purpose or by Accident?
June 20, 2003
by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor
Much has been made about The New York Times reporter who was forced to resign because of fudged reports, unprofessional conduct, and lying. When that story first broke recently, even The Times was forced to make much of it, perhaps as a means of purging themselves professionally. They devoted about five pages of a Sunday issue to recap some of the major failings of their reporter.
It became such a joke among some media professionals that at least one political cartoonist, published elsewhere, suggested that former President Bill Clinton might prefer the fabricating reporter as a ghost writer for his forthcoming memoirs.
The Times’ mea culpa performance didn’t satisfy a lot of other journalists, some of whom felt the cause of that particular problem was enforced ethnic diversity on the newspaper’s staff. Others thought the editors were clearly to blame for the reporter’s failings. But many journalists thought that The Times’ editors had missed the point entirely, that sloppiness and a culture of “advocacy journalism” were at work.
Gunowners were not surprised. They are used to the news media getting this wrong, whether by intent because of their advocacy or because of sheer sloppiness.
I put some of it down to two other things: journalists who do not have a broad enough educational or experience background and a failure of intercultural understanding.
A number of years ago, a serious journalist I know who was managing editor at Pacific Stars & Stripes for part of my stint there, before taking a job with The Buffalo News later became a copy editor on the rim at The New York Times.
Cows and Steers
He told me that one day while he was at work a Times assignment editor handed him a story to edit about the cattle business out West with the explanation that since my friend had worked in Buffalo, he would know all about cows.
As further evidence of the narrow viewpoints that prevail in New York City newsrooms, I once heard Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin, while speaking at a State University at Buffalo student forum some years ago, refer to the then-majority leader of the New York state Senate who hailed from Binghamton, NY, as a hick from a New York City suburb. Binghamton is 200 miles from New York City.
I shouldn’t leave mention of The New York Times, the bell-cow newspaper for most journalists in America, without citing a May 24 report in The Washington Post, another leading anti-gun newspaper.
The Post reported that The Times had lost a libel case tried before a federal court jury in Cleveland, OH. The jury found that The Times and one of its reporters had libeled an Ohio Supreme Court justice in an Apr. 13, 2000 article about a lawsuit filed by the son of Sam Sheppard who was convicted of killing his wife in 1954. In the libel lawsuit, Justice Francis Sweeney was seeking $15 million in damages from the newspaper for saying the judge had used his influence in a case he had been involved in earlier as a prosecutor.
The jury found no malicious intent and refused to award any damages.
Interestingly, The Times reporter in question was Fox Butterworth, the newspaper’s current reporter of record on gun-related issues, and who is not highly regarded by those who are on the “rights side” of the Second Amendment or the industry.
We have other almost daily evidence of journalistic sloppiness at the Second Amendment Foundation offices in Buffalo and Bellevue, WA. Both receive frequent calls from print and broadcast reporters all over the US and from other countries seeking information about guns, gun laws, gun-related statistics and gunowners. We try to field all of these inquiries in an honest and professional manner, always citing government or other sources for the information we provide.
More often than not, we are appalled at the lack of prior information about the subject which the inquiring reporters bring to the interview. But even worse is their inability to grasp historical or current information that runs counter to their own or their editors’ acceptance of information provided by clearly anti-gun sources.
More often than not, they are in too much of a hurry to want to follow-up on other sources we refer them to or to assimilate information about actual self-defense encounters involving armed citizens, or even the specifics of particular types or classes of firearms they inquired about.
Thus it is not surprising when you read a slanted story or totally misleading information as such as references to .38 Special revolvers as “assault weapons.” Needless to say, the term “assault weapon” has been so confused that few in the media or the public understand it, and many journalistic stylebooks make no distinction between an autoloading firearm and a fully automatic as classified under the National Firearms Act.
Which brings me to a report written by Dave Workman that relates to this whole subject and might serve as a closer for my column. Here’s Workman’s report.
Cleveland Gunman
Once again in covering a high-profile story involving a lone gunman with a grudge, the news media got it wrong from the outset about the firearms used, relying apparently on witness accounts and sensational adjectives, rather than fact.
When accused Cleveland, OH, shooter Biswanath Halder, 62, who is charged with killing one person and wounding at least two others when he opened fire at Case Western Reserve University on May 9, initial press reports insisted he was armed with a machinegun. Gun Week quickly contacted the Associated Press bureau in Cleveland to ask the source of that information. A staffer there advised that “We’re backing off of that, and just calling it a ‘high-powered’ weapon.”
As it turned out, that description was still erroneous, as was the Reuters account claiming the gunman was armed with a “Tech-9” (sic), apparently alluding to a Tec-9.
According to Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Mike Tobin, who tracked down the information at Gun Week’s prompting, the guns actually recovered by Cleveland police were a Ruger 9mm semi-auto pistol, and a Cobray M-11, also chambered in 9mm. The Cobray is a visual clone of the Mac-10, designed by the same man.
Cleveland Police Sgt. Donna Bell said the Cobray taken from Halder was a semi-automatic. She told Gun Week that was the only description of the guns her agency had released to anyone.
Halder, a native of Calcutta, India, apparently launched his rampage in revenge for his belief that a computer lab assistant at the school had invaded and trashed Halder’s Internet website. That individual, Shawn Miller, was not hurt in the shooting spree.
While press reports continued focusing on the non-existent machinegun, almost nothing was reported about Halder’s website. It is primarily devoted to educating Indian immigrants, but there are also some curious links to anti-war organizations, a petition to end the “occupation” of Palestine, and one site that calls President Bush unpatriotic.
That’s the end of Workman’s report but not this column yet. The Cleveland stories also used the term “high-powered” without really understanding it. High-powered ammunition may be even more confused by design or ignorance than “assault weapon,” but few in the media seem to care. That is one of the points we try to get straight with reporters and its seems to go in one ear and out the other—as though they are hard of hearing or have nothing between the ears to stop it from passing right through.
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