Here's the problem: not enough media bias against guns

Eric Boehlert is upset that there is too little anti-gun hysteria in the media.

Killing sprees, especially the ones that have erupted since the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007, just don't hold journalists' attention like they used to.

Even more telling was the way the press avoided addressing the issue of gun control in connection with the Alabama rampage. There was a virtual media ban on the topic last week. And that's become the media's trademark pattern when covering the mass murders that stain the country -- they're treated as though they're isolated incidents and as though there is no larger public policy issue that ties them together. The press has pretty much embraced the old NRA mantra: Guns don't kill people. People do.

Eric, though, is much too smart for that, and knows that people don't kill people, and that guns get up, load themselves, point themselves at innocent people, and pull their own triggers--just as dictated by their malignant little steel minds.

But for years, there had been a general newsroom understanding that because of the unique circumstances surrounding killing sprees, where madmen loaded up with assault weapons and ammunition and set out to kill -- to execute -- often random and always innocent people, those events represented blockbuster stories. And that those stories also represented a large enough news hook that related topics, such as gun control, could be introduced into the coverage. Not in an activist way, but as an obvious topic of discussion and exploration.

Ah, yes--the "non-activist" introduction of the agenda you personally favor--what could be more representative of journalistic objectivity than that?

But no longer. For much of the media, the killing sprees are what they are and nothing more.

Eric knows that the killing sprees are more than . . . what they are.

What is perhaps my favorite part comes next:

Meanwhile, when the press has bothered to address the issue in recent years, it's often been from a completely skewed perspective. For instance, looking back at CNN's Virginia Tech coverage from April 2007, one of the few on-air debates about gun control that I could find featured a gun-control advocate as well as a gun-rights advocate. The two didn't really debate whether laws should be tightened to make it more difficult for people to get guns; they debated whether laws should be loosened so that more people could carry guns in places like college campuses.

Yep--by Eric's way of thinking, introducing a second perspective is "completely skewed."

Orwell may have been overly optimistic about where society was headed.

The comments section is dominated by the statist crowd, by the way.