Dear Mr. Gratz, (President of the Society of Professional
Journalists)
I enjoyed your column in the Jan.-Feb 2005 issue of The Quill,
on diverse messages and ethics in the media.
It is increasingly difficult however for me to accept SPJ's apparently
overarching concern about ethics and accuracy, when grotesque distortion
is routine and accepted in news media nationwide. I'm referring specifically
to the gun issue.
Like it or hate it, the gun issue is enormous. Half of all American
homes are estimated to have at least one gun. Yet most reporters I know
hate guns, don't own guns, and have never actually even fired a gun.
They seem terrified of guns, in an almost hoplophobic* way. This shows
in news coverage everywhere. They're entitled to hate, I make no complaint
about that, but when it controls their ethics, accuracy or the diversity
of the stories the public gets to see, it is unacceptable.
"The Bias Against Guns" by Dr. John Lott
carefully documents the outrageously biased coverage (simply the latest
of many studies that uncover the same situation)*. I don't think many
reporters have even heard basic facts like guns save lives, guns stop
crime, and guns are why America is still free, much less report on such
things.
Among nine other books, I wrote the unabridged guide to federal gun
law, Gun Laws of America. Mainstream news stories
on this subject are so far from accurate it's embarrassing. The AP once
reported that Congress hadn't passed a gun bill in five years, when
federal gun law had increased 25% during that period. No amount of effort
could generate a correction (very typical of all gun-story errors).
Reporters comment on bills without reading them (commonly known), get
the facts completely wrong, and typically present anti-rights groups
as heroes and pro-rights groups as heathens.
Along with being the current president of the Society of Professional
Journalists, I see you work for PBS in Maine. A local PBS official here
in Arizona said to me, "We only run hit pieces on guns," in
explaining why an important story about self-defense
cases had been quashed by the brass in D.C., after it was produced
and ready to air. Anyone who listens to PBS knows this is true.
Will SPJ ever confront this hypocrisy? Or will we simply continue to
get high-minded articles that ignore such a rotten underbelly on such
a fundamental issue?
With gun-rights coverage so abysmal, it makes one wonder how well other
subjects fare, and how attentive SPJ really is to diverse views, accuracy
and ethics. It also perhaps squarely addresses why the media is held
in such low esteem by a significant portion of the public, who increasingly
seem to believe, "If it's in the news, it's probably wrong."
That, I can attest, is absolutely true of gun-news coverage.
We ignore this issue at our peril.
Sincerely,
Alan Korwin, Author
Gun Laws of America
*HOP-luh-fobia, n. Morbid fear of weapons. hoplophobic,
hoplophobe.
*For example, Lott reports that in 2001, USA Today ran
5,660 words on gun crimes and zero words on "DGUs" (defensive
gun uses); The New York Times ran 50,745 words about gun crime and a
single 163-word story about an off-duty police officer who used his
gun to prevent a crime; The Washington Post in that time period balanced
its 46,884 words on gun crime with 2 percent, or 953 words, on defensive
use. The three networks combined (ABC, CBS, NBC) ran 190,000 words on
gun crime and not a single word on self defense. Not a single word!
If you consume news, you know criminal misuse of guns is prevalent,
and decent use of guns is simply absent. This compares with 13 scholarly
studies that find at least hundreds of thousands of DGUs annually, with
the most commonly cited figure of 2.5 million DGUs per year. By what
mechanism does the media attain such stunning miscoverage?
I wanted to get in touch with SPJ Ethics Committee co-chairman Fred
Brown, but there doesn't seem to be a way to reach him in the magazine.
Perhaps you could forward these concerns to him for me.
If the figures below are true, then bias and unethical reporting are
as robustly documented as you could ever wish. And no one challenges
the numbers from this Ph.D.'s work.
But you don't need a study because you consume news yourself -- and
you know you see a constant flow of stories about misuse of guns, and
no stories, basically ever, about the good side of guns. For most journalists,
that phrase -- the good side of guns -- is anathema. They can't even
comprehend it. They've certainly never written anything like that, wouldn't
even know how to. Guns are so evil and filthy, how could you cover such
a thing?
The thought of getting together with someone you know and going to the
range a few times this month, to get some story ideas, is an alien concept,
right? You may have never done something as simple as fired a gun in
your life. I know from experience that some newspeople reading this
would never want to, because you truly hate guns and wish they would
all go away. Now there's a diverse approach to the subject.
The only purpose for a range is a place to go to get some background
footage of "guns going off" to dramatize some gun story, the
slant of which we don't have to guess.
Can you, personally, come up with ten good ideas for stories about guns
that have the same chipper attitude as stories about new cars, street
festivals or restaurants? How about a deeper set of pieces that examine,
say, if guns really are why America is still free? Have you ever, in
all your objective, two-sided ethically alert awareness, seen these
stories at your firm? Why not?
This belongs in a discussion of ethics during upcoming Ethics Week.
Sincerely,
Alan Korwin, Author
Gun Laws of America
*For example, Lott reports that in 2001, USA Today ran 5,660 words on
gun crimes and zero words on "DGUs" (defensive gun uses);
The New York Times ran 50,745 words about gun crime and a single 163-word
story about an off-duty police officer who used his gun to prevent a
crime; The Washington Post in that time period balanced its 46,884 words
on gun crime with 2 percent, or 953 words, on defensive use. The three
networks combined (ABC, CBS, NBC) ran 190,000 words on gun crime and
not a single word on self defense. Not a single word! If you consume
news, you know criminal misuse of guns is prevalent, and decent use
of guns is simply absent. This compares with 13 scholarly studies that
find at least hundreds of thousands of DGUs annually, with the most
commonly cited figure of 2.5 million DGUs per year. By what mechanism
does the media attain such stunning miscoverage?
--
Contact:
Alan Korwin
BLOOMFIELD PRESS
"We publish the gun laws."
4848 E. Cactus, #505-440
Scottsdale, AZ 85254
602-996-4020 Phone
602-494-0679 FAX
1-800-707-4020 Orders
https://www.gunlaws.com
alan@gunlaws.com
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