We here at Bearing Arms and at other Second Amendment sites across the internet don’t pretend we’re unbiased. We wear our biases proudly because, frankly, it’s not like anyone else out there is unbiased. We’re just honest about it.
But the problem is that because we’re honest about our biases, we’re not considered “news” by far too many people. That’s fine, of course, because we’re not. Then again, there are a lot of places that are treated as news outlets by these same people who are just as biased, but they lie about it constantly.
And the NRA is calling out one example via its America’s 1st Freedom publication.
On December 19, USA Today published an article titled “Guns marketed for personal safety fuel public health crisis in Black communities.” The byline of the “article” is “Fred Clasen-Kelly and Daniel Chang, KFF Health News.” Most people will not look at the byline. Fewer still will look into KFF Health News (formerly Kaiser Health News).
Even if someone did a quick fact check, they’d find that, in searches, both Google and ChatGPT refer to KFF Health News as an “independent” source of journalism. Specifically, Google says KFF Health News is “a nonprofit, editorially independent national newsroom.” Wikipedia says KFF “conducts its own research, polling, and journalism. Its website has been praised for having the ‘most up-to-date and accurate information on health policy’ … .’”
So, like The New York Times, KFF is an approved member of the mainstream or legacy media. In today’s too often politically charged media climate, that isn’t always a good thing. But most of USA Today’s 250,000 daily print and digital subscribers likely didn’t look that far; instead, most readers probably scrolled down on their phones and digested some or all of this carefully crafted approximately 2,500-word propaganda piece written to make people believe guns cause crimes.
They likely weren’t aware that KFF Health News is endowed by the Kaiser Family Foundation. This San Francisco-based foundation is currently worth about $800 million. It spends around $80 million annually. This “center-Left” foundation focuses on health-related issues. It claims not to do advocacy, but rather instead says it produces “journalism” that media outlets publish.
KFF is also supported, according to its website, by big-monied organizations on the Left, some of which often promote an anti-gun agenda, such as the California Health Care Foundation, Gates Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Silicon Valley Community Foundation and many others. They claim that funders do not influence newsroom decisions or content.
All that being noted, any astute reader who knows even a little about crime likely paused while reading this “article” and hoped that KFF does a better job with actual health-care issues than they did with this freedom issue.
Of course, KFF is just one example. The Trace is another, which we’ve talked about quite a bit.
I don’t have an issue with these “newsrooms” being biased. I think the issue with an unbiased media is that no one is really that unbiased, so having clear biases makes it that much easier for consumers to filter the news through the appropriate lens and make their own determination.
But the mainstream media still largely pretends to be neutral, at least to the general public, yet run reports from both KFF and The Trace without any critical thinking applied. They allow their publications to be mouthpieces for blatantly anti-gun efforts that simply pretend they’re unbiased journalism.
It’s just “unbiased journalism” that never once seems to find any benefit to gun ownership ever.
The laws of probability argue that it’s impossible that, in a large enough system, even statistical noise should find some pro-gun results sooner or later, and yet it never does, either in research or in these entities’ reporting.
Weird.
Instead, news outlets team up with the Bloomberg-funded The Trace or allow KFF to run reports unchecked and unquestioned in their publications, and expect us to take them at face value.
In the case above, they’re taking issue with the gun industry reaching out to new markets. That’s something they don’t do with pretty much any other industry. No one took issue with Sprite trying to corner the market of the Hip Hop community, despite high sugar consumption being linked to a ton of health problems that plague America’s black population. That wasn’t a big deal, and is instead held up as a smart way to gain market share when you’re facing off against two behemoths in Coke and Pepsi.
KFF tried to make out that common sense discussions of gun ownership in the black community were somehow wrong and evil, despite the fact that most black Americans who are killed via so-called gun violence aren’t killed with lawfully owned guns. Many of them are collateral damage in gang warfare who are disarmed thanks to a culture of anti-gun drivel being directed at them for generations, which somehow being a disarmed victim will make them safer.
And the gun rights groups are pushing back on that one, and somehow that’s evil.
But USA Today isn’t going to push back. They’re going to trumpet the claim as if it’s just honest news.
It’s not. It never has been and never will be. Not while they allow wolves in sheep’s clothing to act like they’re part of the unbiased media flock.
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