It’s always mind-boggling when left-wingers complain the media isn’t liberal enough, but it’s just happened at the hard-left site Salon.com. Under a headline insisting “The NRA is losing” – right after the Left took it on the chin in the midterms – Elias Isquith shared spin with Moms Demand Action leader Shannon Watts.
In this case, they’re whining that the media’s walked away from covering “gun safety legislation,” since they can’t plausibly suggest the liberal media are in league with the NRA. The number of network stories in the last six months mentioning the NRA can be counted on two hands, but the tilt remains the same.
For example, take Meet the Press host Chuck Todd last October 19, insisting it’s “petty” for the NRA to oppose an anti-gun-rights Surgeon General nominee:
CHUCK TODD: Senator Casey, why don`t we have a surgeon general confirmed, Dr. Vivek Murthy was nominated over a year ago?
SEN. BOB CASEY: It`s Washington dysfunction, Chuck. It`s as simple as that. We should have one in place. I think that`s part of the problem....
TODD: Senator, I want to go back to the surgeon general issue here. This seems to be politics. The NRA said they were going to score the vote and suddenly everybody froze -- that seemed a little petty in hindsight, does it not?
SEN. MEL BLUNT: Well, you know, the President really ought to nominate people that can be confirmed to these jobs. And frankly then we should confirm them. There`s no question about that. But just a normal worker to Congress --
TODD: Should the NRA have a say? I mean they can have an opinion. But should the NRA have that much influence over a surgeon general nominee? He`s not going to make gun policy.
The leftists are upset that the TV networks don’t act like they’re producing a show called Gun Safety Tonight and hammer their issue routinely.
SALON: As I’m sure you’ve noticed, the media’s interest in the issue of gun violence and questions about gun safety legislation has waned significantly since Sandy Hook and the killings at UCSB. What are the stories that we’re missing?
SHANNON WATTS: The media constantly … writes this narrative that because background checks didn’t pass [in 2013] and because the gun lobby is so strong, nothing is ever going to happen; we might as well all just throw our hands up in the air and go home. And I don’t understand it … because that’s not the narrative on immigration; nothing happened [legislatively] on immigration and people aren’t saying, Oh, well, this issue’s over; everybody pack up your bags, don’t try this again! There are so many different issues out there that people are fighting for, and yet this is the one that the media constantly paints a picture of being bleak and hopeless and it is so the opposite of that.
I’m in the trenches every single day, I’m part of a grassroots organization that is fighting every single day; and we are winning.
Watts noted they’re winning some ballot measures in the states (just as DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz robotically asserted after the wipeout). She added the “gun safety” movement is building a cultural juggernaut like the gay-marriage boosters:
WATTS: We decided that this was very much a cultural issue, so we took this issue to companies and said, You need to have policies around guns just like you do [for] attire, outside food, smoking, etc. And just in the last year we’ve gotten Target, Chipotle, Starbucks, Sonic, Jack in the Box, Chili’s — we’ve gotten all these major retailers and restaurants to say, We don’t want open-carry in our stores (in fact, some of them have said they don’t want any guns in their stores). [Italics in the original.]
If you look at how the acceptance of gay marriage came to be in this country, it was just like this; this is pretty much the playbook. You bypass Congress, you go straight to companies, you go straight to the state legislatures, you build a huge amount of momentum, you educate voters about this issue, and when they go out to the polls in 2016, hopefully you get a Congress in place that’s going to do the right thing. Maybe they’ll do the right thing before that, but we’re not going to rest on our laurels.
