One of the first things I ever wrote for a larger publication was a piece on media bias for TheBlaze. This was many moons ago, before I was really getting paid for work, but I was pretty proud of it. It even ended up in a book about the media, so that was kind of cool.
Since then, though, my views of media bias have evolved a little. Part of that is that the media changed. When I wrote that piece oh-so-long ago, the media was still trying to pretend to be neutral.
Here lately, they’ve stopped pretending.
On issues like guns, though, I don’t know that they ever bothered. Whether they did or didn’t doesn’t matter much right now. What matters is what they do here in 2026.
At America’s 1st Freedom, Charles C.W. Cooke has an excellent piece talking about just that.
He starts by correctly noting that the media has a predisposition to believing that the issue is that we have insufficient gun control, hence their constant focus on what laws aren’t in place in the wake of a horrific shooting, rather than what laws existed and failed, among other things.
And then we get to what I think is the nitty-gritty.
Fortunately for the press, there exists a host of self-appointed “experts” who are only too happy to flatter their preconceptions. Chief among these is The Trace—a supposedly “independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom” that, in practice, is a front for Michael Bloomberg’s gun-control outfit, Everytown for Gun Safety.
I say The Trace is a “front” because its president is John Feinblatt, who is also the president of Everytown for Gun Safety. I say that because its former editorial news director has admitted that “we do bring a point of view to the issue of gun violence.” I say that because, despite insisting in its mission statement that it’s interested simply in using “the power of journalism to improve public understanding,” all of its output militates in a single direction. At one level, The Trace’s model is rather clever: It partners with “more than 300 national and local media organizations,” and, in return, those organizations pretend that it is a legitimate source. Via this arrangement, The Trace gets a series of venues in which to exhibit its advocacy, and those venues get to pretend that they are exhibiting a credible source. Were it not so potentially destructive to a key part of the U.S. Bill of Rights, one might almost be impressed by the ingenuity of the setup.
…
Add Some Fake Statistics
The Trace is by no means alone in this role. For nearly a decade now, it has been all but impossible to read any major piece of journalism that mentions firearms without coming across a rote recitation of the preposterously inflated statistics that are regularly put out by the Gun Violence Archive. Open any gun-related story in a major newspaper, or glance at the chyron during any segment on guns on CNN or MSNBC, and you will invariably be informed that there is a mass shooting in the United States “every day.” For those who don’t pay attention, this sounds extremely scary—the implication being that, somehow, the worst crimes in American history are a daily occurrence, but that only a few of them make the news.
Which, of course, is completely untrue. Most people don’t go and look at the information themselves, so they don’t see that most of these “mass shootings” have zero fatalities, are gang-related, and are nothing at all like what they’ve long thought of as mass shootings.
Because of the media’s predispositions, their own biases, they see these “experts” and sources as not just credible but more credible than experts from the other side of the debate.
They repeat things like how the AR-15 is too powerful for civilian use, all while implying that your .30-06 isn’t, despite every gun person on the planet knowing which is actually more powerful.
We hear about how so-called assault weapons are the preferred firearm for mass shooters, but even by a more rational definition, handguns are still used more often than modern sporting rifles are.
Rarely do we see someone from the pro-gun side cited as an expert in any way, but Everytown’s people are. Their “studies” and “research” are taken at face value, and no one ever questions how there’s not a single study that doesn’t definitively show that guns are bad, even though we can’t seem to get consistent studies on whether eggs are healthy or unhealthy.
The only way that happens is if the study is either set up to reach a preconceived outcome or they just spike anything that doesn’t conform to Everytown’s mission.
But the media will report on it, quote it, and treat it as gospel, all while ignoring how RAND points out each year that those studies are too flawed to take any useful information away from them.
You should go read the whole piece, because Cooke gets into a whole lot more than this. It’s a very good breakdown on how the anti-gun groups lead the media around by the nose and use them as their mouthpieces to push their agenda as if it were absolute fact.
And, of course, the media lets them because they don’t want to find out their own beliefs are wrong.
No matter how much you hate the mainstream media, you don’t hate them enough.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment.
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