Tone Sharks

If I ever need to describe the term “laborious”, I merely refer my listener to “any time public radio tries to prove that it isn’t biased to the left”.

A few years ago, I heard “Weekend All Things Considered”‘s anchor, Bob Simon, carry on an extended conversation with that noted champion of media balance, Ira Glass, on the sheer preposterousness of the idea that National Public Radio was biased to the left.  Glass referred to a series of studies that NPR had carried out, which included a process of “tone analysis”.

Now, I’ve found no evidence on way or another of what was or wasn’t covered by this “tone analysis”.

And the reason the concern isn’t entirely idle came roaring back at me this morning while listening to an NPR newscast referring to a Milwaukee woman who set up a group representing families of, as the newscaster put it, “black men killed by police and vigilantes“.

They’re referring, of course, to armed citizens – many of them also black, by the way – who used lethal force in self-defense, and then overcame the serious legal hurdles involved in defending their own lives from immediate threats of death, as judged by courts that are frequently deeply unfriendly to self-defense.

And of course, “Vigilante” is a bad thing, to “progressives”.

And then I looked further; to National Public Radio, pretty much every citizen that uses lethal force in self-defense, especially when government a can’t or won’t defend them, is a “vigilante”.

Just wondering if the “tone analysis” missed this bit?

5 thoughts on “Tone Sharks

  1. Must have missed their bias on AGW too. Only the most radical of warmites is allowed airtime.

  2. If the feds can make gun ownership a civil rights issue it doesn’t matter how unpopular gun control is, gun control will be imposed.
    To make gun ownership a civil rights issue, the feds have to convince the courts that civilian gun ownership adversely affects Blacks, and that the 14th amendment trumps the 2nd amendment.
    This is why no evidence will convince the Left that gun ownership is an important civil right. You say “I need a gun because I will not misuse it, and it is my legal and human right to protect myself”. They hear “I need a gun to shoot Black people”.

  3. Yes, the “epidemic” of gun violence.

    They deserve $0.00 to pursue their transparently political gun control goals at the CDC.

  4. Swiftee; yes, public health, but Mingo’s argument is just an extension of the same. The question in my mind is not whether it’s going to be tried–the effort is really underway–but rather whether it succeeds.

    And that’s probably a central argument we’ve got to make about rights. Rights are not important just because they’re God-given rights, but also because things just go better with them. We aren’t the immigrant destination of the world because the Bill of Rights makes life suck, after all. How many people wanted to immigrate into Warsaw Pact nations, or fascist nations, and the like? Sorry, but the machine guns are pointed not at the people who want to come in, but at those who want to escape.

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