Mistake-filled reports in Navy shooting reinforces what we already knew about “journalists”

You know, with the media constantly getting egg on their face, time after time, you’d think they’d eventually decide to be just a tad more circumspect in their reporting.

Ha-Ha-Ha!! I kid, obviously.

This time the scene of the MSM’s most recent blunder-palooza was the horrific Navy Yard shooting, where they managed to get virtually every single aspect of their coverage wrong. This Journalist Error Jamboree included everything from the number of gunmen, to his/their identity, all the way down to one outlet (the Daily Mail) using a picture of the “crime scene” …which turned out to be totally unrelated to the shooting.

Hey, kids, these folks are professionals. Don’t try this at home, ‘kay?

“…I am VERY professional…”

The Daily Caller has more:

…MSNBC’s Alex Wagner continued to use a graphic of the Navy Yard shooter wielding the large AR-15 in a report on Tuesday, hours after CNN issued a report that federal officials were backing away from the AR-15 claim.

On Monday a federal law enforcement official told USA Today Alexis was “armed with an AR-15, which is a light-weight semi-automatic rifle, as well as a shotgun and a handgun.”

The Los Angeles Times also reported that Alexis was engaged in a “running gun battle” with Navy security guards while carrying the AR-15.

The Washington Post editorial board asked how Alexis acquired “his weapons (an AR-15 assault rifle, a shotgun and a semiautomatic pistol were reportedly found on him).”

The New York Times cited the false claim as well…

Not to be outdone, our old buddy Piers “EVERYTHING looks like an AR-15 to me, including this microphone” Morgan grabbed hold of the cornucopia of previous mistake-riddled reports and jacked ’em up a notch:

“Law enforcement says he was armed with an AR-15, another rifle, and a semi-automatic Glock. They believed he used the AR-15 for most if not all of the shooting.

That gun was legally purchased.”

Hmm, that statement looks pretty declarative, doesn’t it? Too bad every word is wrong, including the “and” and the “the“.

This is pathetic. The nightly news now more closely resembles one of those America’s Funniest Home Blooper shows, shot in real-time, just with a scrolling chyron at the bottom to let you know it’s “news”. Good grief, the poor schlub guessing at the weekly weather forecast looks practically infallible by comparison.

But the reason this happened to so many news agencies THIS time can be boiled down to two basic, recurring factors:

1. a wild-eyed desire to be first with the story, which too often leads to slipshod reporting, and
2. it was a chance to reinforce a popular, personal ideology among reporters: namely, that guns are bad and that the AR-15 is the baddest of them all.

That’s how so many J-school grads, who’ve supposedly studied their “craft” for years, end up giving voice to less informed opinions than you find on ‘TMZ’.

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I mention all this today, because it ties directly into a recent attempt to declare ‘Journalists’ to be a protected society, an “elite” closed group:

(via The LA Times) – Journalists and bloggers who report news to the public will be protected from being forced to testify about their work under a media shield bill passed by a Senate committee Thursday.

(…)

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) insisted on limiting the legal protection to “real reporters“ and not, she said, to a 17-year-old with his own website.

“I can’t support it if everyone who has a blog has a special privilege … or if Edward Snowden were to sit down and write this stuff, he would have a privilege. I’m not going to go there,” she said.

Feinstein introduced an amendment that defines a “covered journalist” as someone who gathers and reports news for “an entity or service that disseminates news and information.” The definition includes freelancers, part-timers and student journalists, and it permits a judge to go further and extend the protections to any “legitimate news-gathering activities”… 

So, when we see CNN, CBS, the New York Times, et al all erroneously reporting news that is laughably wrong, despite their ‘layers and layers’ of fact-checkers, what we’re allegedly witnessing is the stolid professionalism of (and I quote): “legitimate news-gathering activities“????

Talk about damning with faint praise.

In the final analysis, there’s really only a single, major common element here, and “news-gathering” sure ain’t it. Rather, it’s that truly independent bloggers/reporters can’t be trusted to march in lockstep with journalism’s intelligentsia, which is reason enough to make sure this bill never sees the light of day.

This is nothing more than the eternal commitment of the Dinosaur Media (and their powerful political pals) to the furtherance of The Narrative. And for anyone who has never seen the definitive work on that term, we’re including it again for you below.

That it’s from Bill Whittle should be of no surprise. That several years later the problems he highlighted are somehow even worse should, sadly, surprise you even less.

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