At least one student who survived the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last week will NOT be found caught up in the fight for gun control. Brandon Minoff, a senior at the Parkland high school, told Fox News on Tuesday that he’s been disappointed in the media’s coverage of the tragedy and their race to push an agenda over the corpses of his classmates.
“I wholeheartedly believe that the media is politicizing this tragedy,” he said. “It seems that gun control laws is the major topic of conversation rather than focusing on the bigger issue of 17 innocent lives being taken at the hands of another human.”
Minoff isn’t necessarily positioning himself on the other side of the debate. Rather, he’s questioning the motives of those in the media who have been carefully crafting a very specific political narrative for his fellow students to follow. And in speaking out against that cynical effort, he’s shining a light on one of the media’s favorite tricks: Cherry-picking interviews to feature only those people who are going to toe the line.
“I know many people who are pro-gun and others who support gun control but it seems that the media is specifically targeting those in support of gun control to make it seem as if they are the majority, and the liberal news outlets are the ones that seem to make the bigger effort to speak to these people, and I’m talking from experience,” said Minoff.
It doesn’t bother us that a certain number of survivors are pushing for more gun control, and it doesn’t really bother us that there are pundits in the media doing the same. Nor is it any skin off our backs to see politicians pushing for AR-15 bans, universal background checks, or any of the rest of it. That’s fine. This is America, and we should be able to have a debate about how to respond to these shootings.
The problem arises when only one form of argument is allowed. The problem arises not when a pundit or two advocates an assault rifle ban but when EVERY pundit and EVERY expert and EVERY Democrat and EVERY student from this high school advocates the ban. And no, this does not mean what the media wants you to think it means: That literally everyone except the NRA and its paid cronies wants to ban these guns. It means that this is the only viewpoint acceptable to the powers that run the New York Times, NBC, CNN, and the rest of the liberal media. You either agree with them…or you’re some loony crackpot with a shrine to Timothy McVeigh in your basement.
Well, that’s just not the case, and the polls prove it. The fact that there is so much support on the pro-Second Amendment side is actually a miracle, considering how the issue of guns is treated by the media. If the coverage was fair and balanced (to coin a phrase), we can only imagine what the polls would look like on issues of gun control.
But then, that’s exactly what the media is afraid of.
