The Mainstream Media Is Gobbling Up Conservative Crazies

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[Commentary] Vice President Joe Biden tried to explain that the right-wing reports alleging that the president sought to take Americans’ guns away was a “bunch of malarkey,” and added, “To be very blunt with you, we’re counting on all of you, the legitimate news media, to cover these discussions.” Good luck with that, Mr. Vice President.

The sad truth is that this nonsense is introduced into the media ecosystem by right-wing reality-denying sources, and it almost always makes its way into the mainstream media—often going unchallenged. Take, for example, Ted Nugent himself. Why in the world, while previewing a report on—you guessed it—Nugent’s views on firearms, would CNN’s Deb Feyerick claim that this violent lunatic enjoyed “a very deep connection with the facts and the facts that he needs to make his argument”? In the first place, it’s a logically nonsensical statement. More importantly, however, it is patently false. There are said to be as many as 80 million guns in private hands in this country. Nobody could take them away, even if they wanted to—and as Vice President Biden tried to explain, nobody does. Yet just three days after Feyerick made herself look foolish in the service of Nugent’s nuttiness, during a February 4 segment on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront,” both Feyerick and Burnett went even deeper into the weeds, wondering aloud what would happen if the Obama administration attempted to “take all the guns away tomorrow.”


The Mainstream Media Is Gobbling Up Conservative Crazies