There's been a lot going on, so I missed the New York Times engaging in a new bout of dumb when it comes to guns. The idea was to track so-called assault weapon bans.
Unfortunately, they managed to blow it.
How badly?
Bad enough for the self-described "sober, serious" voice in gun political journalism — to be fair, Stephen Gutowski actually is, and he's damn good at it — to call it out.
The piece, titled Tracking Assault Weapons Bans Across the Country, was published last Saturday. As the name implies, the thrust of the piece details how many “assault weapons” bans exist ahead of the Supreme Court’s Viramontes v. Cook County case that’s set to decide their fate by next summer. It gets that basic count right, at least.
However, the piece has numerous assertions that are either dubious or outright false.
Let’s start with mistakes in discussing the legal landscape. While the piece gets the ban count right and accurately describes the status of the challenge to New Jersey’s ban, it misstates the situation in Virginia and Delaware. The piece correctly notes that state judges have paused challenges to Virginia’s ban pending the Supreme Court’s decision, but it also falsely claims the law can’t take effect before the Supreme Court rules. Well, of course, the Virginia ban already took effect for about three weeks earlier this summer before being enjoined.
Similarly, the piece notes that the ruling against New Jersey’s ban has significant implications for Delaware’s ban since they share the same federal circuit. But it frames the danger for the ban as forward-looking: “if a challenge was brought in court.” It’s true the New Jersey ruling implicates Delaware’s law–though, a Supreme Court ruling supersedes the Third Circuit’s opinion and threatens all of these bans anyway. Regardless, Delaware’s ban has already been challenged in court.
In other words, it looks like just terrible work, at least to me.
These are basic facts, and Gutowski doesn't stop at these. He goes on for quite a while, and I'm not sure he was even trying to create an exhaustive list of grievances.
But as bad as this is, Gutowski identifies it, as alluded to above, as part of the issue with the coverage of gun rights news.
And he breaks down much of how this happened.
Kavi is listed as a news assistant in her Times bio. That means she doesn’t have a specific beat at this point. She is assigned stories from across a broad spectrum of topics and does her best to write quick pieces on them.
It’s possible that Kavi or her editor are inserting their opinions of the AR-15’s design and lethality out of an ideological commitment, but I think the lack of specialization is the key factor in the sorts of mistakes in this piece.
A reporter is responsible for relaying accurate information. Of course, their editor is responsible for ensuring they’ve done that. It’s considerably more difficult to do that if you aren’t knowledgeable about the subject you’re writing on, and it’s nearly impossible to build that knowledge if you’re constantly moving from topic to topic.
If you’re not knowledgeable, it’ll show up in your writing. The audience will notice, and they will be more likely to tune out your reporting. It will harm your reputation and the reputation of the outlet you write for.
He's not wrong, but only to a point.
See, the "Gell-Mann Amnesia " effect is a phenomenon where someone will read an article in a newspaper or magazine (or website) that they know a good deal about, and they'll see all of the mistakes. They'll look at it as shoddy journalism and lambast both the reporter and the paper itself, then move on to the next article and take that piece as gospel.
In this case, Kavi might get people like Gutowski or me, or pretty much any of you, rolling our eyes, but the next thing she writes will be accepted widely, even by people who are pissed about this level of failure by such a major newspaper.
There's a point where that ends, though, and that's where Gutowski's point really hits, because how many of you trust the New York Times these days? How many look at the Times stories on the front page and actually accept what they're saying as factual, without a hint of bias?
Exactly.
Kavi here might be trying to avoid the appearance of bias, but while I'm a firm believer that we shouldn't ascribe to malice that which can be adequately ascribed to incompetence, in the case of the New York Times, it's obvious that at a certain point, the difference between incompetence and malice is irrelevant due to the amount of damage caused.
This is a legitimate problem, and if the news media wants to resolve it, they need to start with people who actually know guns, who don't hate the people who own and carry them, and are willing to push back on the inane claims by anti-gunners. If they push back on us, so be it, because we can withstand the pushback just so long as it's fair.
But the odds of that are only slightly better than my wife arranging a night in Vegas for me with Sydney Sweeney in the ultimate hall pass.
Yeah, ain't happening.
Editor's Note: The mainstream media continues to gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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