"The far left is making [the average American gun owner and NRA member] a villain for abiding by your Second Amendment rights," and they're finding willing accomplices in supposedly objective journalists like Bob Schieffer, Brent Bozell argued on the January 17 edition of Fox News Channel's Hannity. The Media Research Center president was reacting to a soundbite in which the CBS anchor compared the political challenge of President Obama taking on the NRA to defeating the Third Reich in World War II.
"Surely passing civil rights legislation as Lyndon Johnson was able to do, and before that, surely defeating the Nazis was a much more formidable task than taking on the gun lobby," Schieffer noted on January 16 shortly after President Obama's press conference on gun control. "This is a turning point in this country.," Schieffer insisted, concluding, "Unless we figure out a way to make sure that something like Newtown never happens again, we're not the country that we once were." [watch the full Hannity "Media Mash" segment below the page break]
When liberal journalists like Schieffer attack the "gun lobby," they're really attacking law-abiding "gun owners," the Bozell observed, many of whom are dues-paying NRA members. That's "tens of millions of Americans who are abiding by the law and they're in the same sentence as Nazis. This should be insulting" but the rest of the media hardly blink at such an incendiary charge.
Schieffer's use of language is a classic Saul Alinsky tactic, Bozell noted: creating a cast of villains and victims for a biased news narrative in a cynical attempt to shape public opinion.
"This is the same man, by the way, who likened Rick Santorum to Josef Stalin. This is the same man who likened Gov. Rick Scott of Florida to the Romanian dictator and murderer Nicolai Ceauşescu," Bozell reminded Hannity's audience. "These people have no problem at all slinging mud with the worst form of character assassination if it's going to advance their liberal agenda."
The third and final topic of the Media Mash segment was a new Culture and Media Institute study showing that the top five movies at the box office right now feature a total of 65 violent scenes and 185 victims.
"This is, I believe, the single most important reason why we have such a violent culture, because the popular culture is so violent," the NewsBusters publisher noted. "And it is amazing that all these people in the news media, in the administration, no one's talking about it. Why? Because it's that same industry that's the number one funder of the far left."
