What happened at Virginia Tech today is not a "tragedy" in the way that tragedy is usually defined as being a sudden accident. No, it was a cold-blooded crime. But, the criminal action at Virginia Tech had barely finished before news sources began their meme against guns, those "permissive laws" controlling them and the "easy access" to them. All are common phrases used to attack gun rights and this incident is being used as a platform to launch that line of attack everywhere. It's as if, before the last victim was even cold, every anti-gun advocate in the country hurriedly warmed up their cars to race to their local media source to call for more gun control. The debate over this issue is perfectly reasonable, of course, but that the MSM would use this crime as a springboard for their attacks on guns so soon after this incident had been perpetrated smacks of political opportunism.

CBS News gives us the claim that it is "much too easy to get guns in the state of Virginia." And they assure us this crime happened because "there's no gun registration, no mandatory waiting period to purchase weapons. The only major restriction: a limit of one gun purchase per month." And, the CBS report is echoed all across the news media.

The Washington Post produced two very different takes on Monday in stories about motivating school children to pay attention to threats looming in their future. First, there was an urgent front-page story about the need to educate children about the cataclysmic vision of a world destroyed by global warming – "the atomic bomb of today" – with absolutely no one skeptical of the almost religious claims of hellish destruction in the very near future. One campus activist asked: "What's the use of a college degree when Wall Street is under water?"

Second, in stark contrast, came a story on the front-page of Metro about selling the religious message of Jesus along with free pizza. But this article was stuffed with skeptical students who were offended by the evangelizing – even as they snagged the lunch. "The free food they like...The praying they don’t."

Darragh Johnson’s front-page story was headlined "Climate Change Scenarios Scare, and Motivate Kids." Its beginning underlined just how dramatically young children are being frightened about their world ending around the corner:

Monday afternoon ABCNews.com was quick to put up a speculative posting, without any real knowledge of what the shooter used, headlined, “Lapse of Federal Law Allows Sale of Large Ammo Clips” (NewsBusters item), and a bit later ABCNews.com posted an interactive poll with a very leading question: “Do you think this incident is a reason to pass stricter gun control legislation?” But in a World News story, while Jake Tapper highlighted calls for stricter gun laws, he also gave equal time to calls “for greater access to guns” so people can protect themselves and he undermined ABC's idle ammo clip posting by pointing out how since “politicians don't necessarily know the details” of what really occurred, “they don't know whether any laws were broken or any loopholes need to be closed.” Tapper also discredited the assumption of the unscientific ABCNews.com poll, citing how a Gallup survey found the public is “more inclined to blame these incidents on the ways parents raise their children or on popular culture than on the availability of guns.”

Newsweek’s cover story also carried a half-page feature on page 29 about the "Leaders of the ‘Shock Jock’ Pack." (I could not find the article online.) Writer Jessica Ramirez wrote, "Don Imus’s world imploded last week after he made racist and sexist remarks." Ramirez used data from Talkers Magazine, including a list of "Up-And-Comers." Note the labeling contrast:

Mark Levin was "An ultraconservative in the Sean Hannity style. This best-selling author’s show is syndicated through ABC Radio Networks."

Stephanie Miller was "One of the most popular and funny liberal radio hosts in the country. Miller is syndicated by Jones Radio Networks."

Ed Schultz was "A dominant liberal voice with a political bent similar to Al Franken’s. Schultz is syndicated by Jones Radio Networks."

H/t reader BD.

A New York Times TV reviewer thinks the level-headedness of a U.S. Army veteran of Iraq could be symptomatic of a deep emotional disorder.

In In War’s Daily Grind, Death Is Routine, Dinner Is Good in today's Times, Ginia Bellafante reviews “Warriors,” described as "the second of 11 documentaries to be shown this week as part of PBS’s 'America at a Crossroads' series."  According to Bellafante:

"Ron Maloney, a National Guard lieutenant, returns from a 22-month tour in Iraq to his neat, welcoming house on Long Island and tends to his garden. There is a robust-looking lawn, and there are pretty flowers on a vine. The peace and comfort of such luxuries are unfamiliar to so many people outside the United States, he suggests.

Update added at bottom of post.

In a 2:30 p.m. posting, well before details about the weapons used in the tragic Virginia Tech shootings were available, ABC News's Brian Ross devoted a "Blotter" blog entry to a gun control advocate's talking points. Ross didn't make room for any gun rights advocates or find a critic to suggest the Brady Center was callously capitalizing on a tragedy to further its political agenda. Here's the entire blog post:

High capacity ammo clips became widely available for sale when Congress failed to renew a law that banned assault weapons.

Web sites now advertise overnight UPS delivery of the clips, which carry up to 40 rounds for both semi-automatic rifles, including 9mm pistols, and handguns.

"High capacity magazines read extreme firepower and gusto. Stock Up!" is the headline of one of many gun shop Web sites.

Virginia law enforcement officials have not identified the weapon used in the shootings today at Virginia Tech, but gun experts say the number of shots fired indicate, at the very least, that the gunman had large quantities of ammunition.

"When you have a weapon that can shoot off 20, 30 rounds very quickly, you're going to have a lot more injuries," said Peter Hamm of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

That item is the only "Blotter" entry about the Virginia Tech shootings so far today. Hamm's group, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, issued a press statement on the site's home page that peddles its talking points. It also has a brand new petition page up at the site set up to sign up readers for e-mail updates. Curiously enough, "journalist" is one of the selections a petitioner can check off when describing him or herself on the form:

Guilty until proven innocent – that was the verdict for the student loan industry on CNN’s “In the Money" on April 14.

Regular panelist Jennifer Westhoven had some harsh words regarding the investigation into preferred student lending practices.

"This kind of a scandal is the kind of thing you think about when you think about Enron and, y’know, Wall Street firms and chop shops …” said Westhoven.

CNN reporter Christine Romans agreed, but then took the conversation a step further smearing drug companies in the process.

“And when you look at sort of the business plan, you look at what some of the allegations are in this – in this industry scandal, you see that these sound like drug companies. ‘Let’s get our representatives into the financial aid office, let’s give gifts, let’s get people owning stock, let’s get them on our boards, so that our student loan can be right up there, preferred student loan for students, whether or not it may be the best fit for students,’” said Romans.

Newsweek’s cover story on Don Imus this week carried a confessional tone, offering penance from Newsweek bigwigs for enabling the I-Man due to their hunger to be a part of the "in crowd." Weston Kosova’s story lectured about how the Imus incident compares to Hurricane Katrina and the O.J. Simpson verdict in showing "media power is still concentrated largely in white hands and, as a result, racism is sometimes tolerated and enabled in ways that many white Americans are unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge."

Newsweek is also contrite this week its coverage of the wildly mishandled Duke lacrosse rape allegations, but they offered no broad Big Picture moral about how that shows a media too willing to believe in racism in every legal case. In fact, the story  has a strange subheadline, with the notion of "innocence" in quotes, as in you shouldn't quite believe it, and it prides itself that all the injustice done to the three accused white boys wasn't just a nightmare: "It was also maturing."

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman was at it again, pushing his peace in the Middle East through environmentalism strategy. Invited on this morning's Today show to promote his upcoming Discovery Channel documentary called Green: The New Red, White and Blue, Friedman claimed one of the best ways to promote democracy in Iraq was to bring down the price of oil through energy saving green technology. Friedman also repeated his clarion call to retake the meaning of the word green from conservatives when NBC's Matt Lauer tossed the following softball to him:

Lauer: "Yeah and you say it's time to stop thinking about the green movement as tree-huggers and sissies. This is tough domestic and foreign policy."

According to TV Newser, football fans can probably expect some liberal bias in the upcoming NFL season. Keith Olbermann, the reliably left-wing MSNBC host, will become the co-anchor of NBC’s "Football Night in America":

MSNBC host Keith Olbermann is returning to network sports after a six year absence as a co-host of NBC's Football Night in America.

"This will, obviously, be great fun and a great privilege for me," Olbermann says. "To be reunited with NBC Sports, and Dick, and the entire production team, produces all the warm-and-fuzzies you'd be expecting. And even if they weren't old friends and colleagues, to get to work with the nonpareil of sportscasters in Bob, and the most insightful and honest of sports analysts in Cris, will be rewarding and challenging. I hope I can hold up my end of the equation."

Readers may recall that, back in 2000, radio star Rush Limbaugh auditioned to join ABC’s "Monday Night Football" broadcast, an act that horrified the Washington Post and other liberal outlets.

The BBC wouldn’t run a dramatic TV movie about an Iraq war hero and also banned all message board entries linking to controversial anti-terror blog Little Green Footballs, but April 17, the network tops itself. The London Times reports that the Beeb will feature “Weddings and Beheadings,” a short story by an acclaimed Pakistani-British author, which is about an Iraqi camera man who “takes a blackly comic approach to the execution of hostages in Iraq” (emphasis mine throughout):

  Weddings and Beheadings by Hanif Kureishi — writer of My Beautiful Laundrette and The Buddha of Suburbia — tells the story of a jobbing cameraman in Baghdad who films executions to earn a living and jokes about it as a way to cope.

On the April 16 edition of "The View," Rosie O’Donnell responded to Tom DeLay’s call for her firing by asserting we’re "entering dangerous territory" against free speech. Apparently, free speech does not extend to Mr. DeLay’s right to call for her firing. Rosie also tried to clarify her anti-Asian remarks noting she made a joke, and Don Imus did not.

ROSIE O’DONNELL: I don’t feel concerned, but I will tell you this. I think we're in dangerous territory when people like Tom DeLay a man of high moral standards, [laughter] when people like Tom DeLay want me to be fired for my political opinions. That's a dangerous state of affairs here in democracy. If you have a dissenting opinion, you know, that you are somehow a threat to the country or the world, if you want to bring up a subject or question something in our government or that our government is doing you're somehow not patriotic and therefore should be off the air. That’s when we’re–

In an online chat at washingtonpost.com today, media reporter Howard Kurtz condemned the media's rush to judgment in 2006 in the Duke lacross rape allegations.

"If you go back and lok at the coverage of 13 months ago, knowing what we know now, teh tone of much of it was irresponsible," wrote Kurtz in response to a question from Floris, Va. Later in response to a question from Portland, Ore., Kurtz cited the 1996 Olympic park bombing and the early media buzz over suspect Richard Jewell, "who turned out to be innocent." Kurtz worried that the media's rush to judgment in sensational crime stories "is a lesson the profession never seems to learn."

Kurtz's remarks about media coverage differ wildly from the cavalier tone taken by ABC's Terry Moran in a blog post from April 12.

Writing on his "Pushback" blog then, Moran insisted that the Duke lacrosse players received "special treatment in the justice system -- both negative and positive." He failed to offer a similar indictment of the media frenzy surrounding the case and even suggested that the Duke players would get over their ordeal with little trouble (portions in bold are my emphasis):

Bill Maher, host of HBO’s "Real Time," appeared on the April 16 edition of "The View" to voice his opposition to all religion. Maher asserted that "pretty much all religion" is bad and all religion is "childish destructive nonsense." Co-host, Joy Behar inquired "What about people who just like to go to church, you know, the old ladies in my neighborhood who used to go and light a candle?" Maher responded likewise.

"They are certainly better than people who fly planes into buildings, yes. But they are enablers for some thing that is worldwide and winds up killing more people, distracting us from more good works."

According to Maher’s logic, the Salvation Army, Father Joe’s Villages, and church going conservatives who donate more to charity than secular liberals, are all "distracted from more good works."

Time’s cover story on Don Imus this week is authored by TV writer James Poniewozik, and he appeared on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal on Friday morning to plug it. I haven’t seen the whole hour, but just caught the end, when a caller from Manteca, California said that while the Time writer had suggested Imus was for the white elites, he said it seemed to him like a show for liberal elites, so "I kind of feel it’s the left eating their own."

Poniewozik had an interesting response to the caller: "I don’t know if I would go so far as to call every journalist who regularly appeared on Imus liberal off hand, but I think he makes an excellent point. I mean, frankly, in a lot of the major media, there’s this knee-jerk immediately dismissive attitude toward Fox, that among a lot of the same people in the same circles that would go on Imus and shrug all the stuff that he did off. That general point, I think the caller has absolutely right."

Update at bottom of page.

Harvard researcher Matthew Miller released a study on April 10 that ties higher suicide rates with higher rates of firearm ownership. Six days later the Washington Post's Shankar Vedantam printed a five-paragraph brief in the paper's "Science Notebook" that cribbed heavily from the Harvard School of Public Health press release. Yet nowhere in his story was the fact that a liberal anti-gun think tank gave $700,000 to finance the School's research.

No gun rights advocates or independent statisticians were quoted to critique the study's methodology or to question the political motivations that may have guided the study, although Vedantam had five days to round up critics of the study.

Another glaring omission in Vedantam's April 16 story: he failed to inform readers that the Harvard study was financed by the liberal Joyce Foundation.

A review of the Joyce Foundation's Web site makes clear it has an activist anti-gun ownership agenda.

For one thing, the foundation only gives grant monies to organizations it feels will help advance its liberal, anti-gun agenda. According to a "Common Question" page in its "gun violence" section:

Tucked in the back of Sunday's Washington Post Magazine was the usual humor column by Gene Weingarten, devoted this week to allegedly feeling sorry for George W. Bush's low standing in public opinion, then relishing the idea of anti-Bush feeling in every single area of the newspaper, such as the horoscope:

Cancer (June 22-July 22)

Hold your head high. It is not your fault that you share an astrological sign with the president of the United States, who is, appropriately enough, a malignancy.

It's a satire, but there are days when it almost matches the bias of The Washington Post in weird sections like Food or Travel. Weingarten also borrowed from CBS's Charles Osgood in using Dr. Seuss as a model for conservative-bashing, as he imagined a Bush-bashing children's book:

An April 12, 2007, article by Stephanie Simon in the Los Angeles Times claimed that "national cancer experts" have found no link between abortion and an increased risk of breast cancer (ABC = "Abortion-Breast Cancer").

The truth:

• 29 out of 41 worldwide studies reveal an ABC link. (See "The Abortion-Breast Cancer Link" by Angela Lanfranchi, MD, FACS)
  
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You just have to read two supposedly "objective" news stories from April 12 to see where Agence France-Presse (AFP) stands.

Here is one on immigration:

France shows harsh face to some immigrants

PARIS, April 12, 2007 (AFP) - France shows a harsh, intolerant face to the thousands of illegal immigrants it deports every year under tough new policies adopted by Nicolas Sarkozy, the man tipped to become the nation's next president.

And then there's inevitable "right-wing crazy man" angle (again, in an "objective" report):

Scratch a radical environmentalist, find a radical, full stop. Case in point: Boston Globe columnist James Carroll. In his New thinking to save the earth [is that all?], Carroll calls for nothing less than the end of the United States as we know it, and a yours-is-mine socialism.

Carroll claims that "if the earth is to survive as a human habitat," the meaning of four subjects "must be transformed." Among the things Carroll wants to redefine are "nation" and "property." Ominous enough, but getting down into the details is even more chilling.