There was a time when the news media cast a skeptical eye at any press release that came over the transom. It was assumed that they were filled with what advertising people call “case making” and journalists used to call “lies.”
Consequently, the content of a press release was scrutinized carefully, lest readers or viewers be mis- or mal-informed.
In the early ’90s there was a group in this state called North Carolinians Against Racist and Religious Violence, NCARRV for short. Each year it would issue a press release listing all the “hate crimes” that had taken place in North Carolina the previous year. Invariably the release would express alarm at the increase in these bias crimes.
I had just become managing editor of The Herald-Sun in Durham back then, so I told our reporter to call NCARRV and get the actual list of these hate crimes, with descriptions and details, not just the numbers. When we got it, we found that “hate crimes” included things like “The home of a gay man in Wilmington was burglarized.” Also listed were several editorial cartoons from across the state that had nothing to do with race or religion, much less violence.
We ran that story, and I wrote a column about the dishonesty of NCARRV. And then a funny thing happened. The group never put out that release again. In fact, the group disappeared.
I thought of NCARRV recently when Everytown, a group funded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, issued a press release claiming that there had been 74 “school shootings” in America since the Sandy Hook shooting in December 2012. I couldn’t remember 74 incidents in which a deranged gunman entered a school and began shooting randomly at kids, which is what the Everytown report implied.
Apparently I was not the only one. Even CNN, after analyzing the cases, cut it down to 15 incidents. After reading CNN’s 15, I would cut it down by a few more than that, as several were after-school shootings between gang rivals or students with a grudge against each other.
Another batch of incidents, alarmingly, took place at historically black colleges or universities, but they also were violent disputes between individuals or groups, not random gun violence on a captive group of students.
Still, many news media outlets eagerly ran Everytown’s statistics without checking on their validity. Whether editors were motivated by anti-gun personal feelings is impossible to determine, but it would not be the first time that news judgments were made with an eye toward perpetuating a certain narrative.
Perhaps this latest incident of “advocacy research” will make editors more careful. I hope so.
Jon Ham (@rivlax) is vice president for communications at the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.