New Study Documents Media Bias Against NRA

A University of Michigan researcher has compared national print media coverage of the NRA with that received by the NAACP, the ACLU, the AARP and Handgun Control, Inc., and the differences he found might surprise even many NRA members.

Brian Anse Patrick, in his dissertation for his doctorate in communication, analyzed nearly 1,500 articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Christian Science Monitor from 1990 until 1998. Using 16 objectively defined measures, he found:

• 87% of editorials and op-eds covering NRA were negative, while 52% of those on the other groups, collectively, were unfavorable.

• NRA averaged 1.14 paragraphs of direct quotes or attributed viewpoints per news article, compared to 2.9 for the other groups combined.

• Negative verbs of attribution, such as "claims," "asserts" and "argues" -- rather than the more neutral "says" or "said" -- were used more often for NRA sources than for other sources. "What this appears to do is to qualify NRA positions as tentative while representing the opinions of other sources as undisputed fact," Patrick writes.

• NRA officials quoted were identified with their proper organizational titles less than 20% of the time, compared with about 64% of HCI sources.

• NRA was regularly mocked or satirized in news coverage -- 26.8% of the headlines for NRA stories since 1990 have used a joke or pun. Patrick found not one instance of a joke headline being aimed at HCI.

• NRA was more than twice as likely to be referred to as a "lobby" or "special interest group," the others being much more likely to be referred to with more positive labels, such as "advocacy group" or citizens group."

• NRA was much less likely to receive coverage for news conferences, special events, reports and news releases than other groups. Less than 7% of NRA's coverage consisted of these types of events, compared to a range of about 29% to 43% for the other groups.

• Also, only about 6% of NRA coverage included photos of NRA officials or events, compared with 27% for the NAACP, ACLU, AARP and HCI, combined.

"In all, the NRA is indeed treated much differently than the other groups," Patrick says. "And these differences are systematic, meaning they persist over time, across media sources and for many content categories across all article types."

"But," Patrick concludes, "since NRA communication strategies are measurably premised upon 'conflict' and 'media bias' themes, it may prove that negative press coverage, whether actual or alleged, is an indispensable mobilizing tool of the NRA, providing fuel for activism, membership increase, fund raising and single-issue voting."

While that may very well be true, of course it does not absolve the media from its undeniable failure to deal with NRA and Second Amendment issues honestly. One recent example of media bias in reporting on guns in America -- an article titled "Caught in the Crossfire," which appeared in the June 28, 1999, issue of Newsweek -- was so flagrant it prompted the following letter from the NRA-ILA Executive Director James Jay Baker:

To the editors:

The "Do Laws Save Lives?" chart accompanying your June 28 article on the House of Representatives' rejection of President Clinton's latest "gun control" effort conatined an error of such grievous magnitude that I am sure you will want to correct it.

The graphic portrayed the U.S. firearm-related death rate in 1993 -- the year the Brady Act passed -- as 4,000 deaths for every 100,000 people in the country. In truth, the rate was actually 15 per 100,000, less than one-half of 1 percent the figure claimed in the graphic.

The article itself contained some other false assertions. The foremost of these is the president's claim that the House voted his bill down because "the NRA beat me." In fact, the president was beaten by the American people, whom he repeatedly implored to make their views known to Congress. That's precisely what they did, once NRA alerted them to the fine-print details in the bill. Armed with the facts, the people took it from there.

Clinton would do well to take a lesson from Newsweek's own commentator, george Will, who described the House vote by saying "Congress this week worked exactly the way the Founding Fathers designed it. When the American people want something intensely and protractedly, it happens, when they don't, it doesn't...that's the way it's supposed to work."

James Jay Baker
Executive Director
NRA Institute for Legislative Action

Instead of publishing NRA's response, Newsweek ran in its July 12 issue this less-than-direct correction: "In a chart accompanying out June 28 story on gun control, the numerical values on its vertical axis should have ranged from 0 to 40,000, not 4,000. And the graph line itself reflects total firearm-related deaths in the United States from 1962 to 1996, not deaths per 100,000. If the graph had been adjusted for population growth, its shape would have been much flatter."

Indeed, likewise, if the earth had been much flatter, Columbus would have sailed off it.

But back to the Patrick study. As part of his research, he attempted to interview journalists who write about NRA. He met with little success, writing: "Most of the journalists would not return calls when they were contacted and asked to participate in the study. Call-backs did not help. Neither did assurances of anonymity reverse refusals. The non-response rate, as thus defined, is almost 95%."

One journalist who did agree to be interviewed, summed it all up this way: "I've been a reporter for 25 years, and I'm familiar with the opinions of other people in the field. Elite reporters sympathize with gun control positions, not with NRA."