As NRA gets more desperate its attacks grow nastier

Margaret Sullivan opinion

One of the more outrageous assertions in a week overrun with them was Dana Loesch’s outright lie that journalists in the United States relish massacres of children.

“Many in legacy media love mass shootings,” the National Rifle Association’s spokeswoman charged. “Crying white mothers are ratings gold.”

Wayne LaPierre, the group’s chief executive, joined right in, smearing journalists and gun-control advocates alike. “They don’t care about our schoolchildren,” he told a fired-up crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference, meeting at National Harbour outside Washington. “They want to make all of us less free.”

They’re wrong, of course. Ridiculously so.

This charge is about as valid as President Donald Trump’s depiction of the media as the enemy of the people, which he repeated on Saturday.

On the contrary, every journalist I know is sickened, sometimes literally, by the need to cover one mass shooting after another.

“There’s nothing more horrific, crushing, draining & painful than covering mass shootings,” tweeted Matt Ferner, a national reporter for HuffPost.

He added: “I vomited while covering the San Bernardino attack I was so overwhelmed. I often can’t sleep for days after going to shooting sites.”

After spending more than three decades in newsrooms ranging in size from the Niagara Falls Gazette to the New York Times, I’ve never heard a hint of glee about such atrocities — not from reporters or editors, and not from circulation directors or those who track digital engagement.

The NRA is wrong, disgustingly wrong, about this.

It’s even more wrong about the news media as its adversary — a claim that’s certainly not new but now blasted out at higher volume. Remember, although it bills itself as a defender of constitutional rights, the NRA is a lobbying group whose fundamental role is to protect the business interests of gun manufacturers.

Should a lobbying group be given as much credence in the national conversation as the NRA has been awarded over the past week — presented, all too often, as a legitimate purveyor of policy ideas?

“We’re acting as though lobbyists have a right to have a say, or to help us write our nation’s gun policies. They don’t,” said Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, an advocacy group seeking gun-control changes.

It’s an important point. And while it’s hard to deny that the NRA is a major part of this story, because so many lawmakers toe its line, journalists need to remind their readers what the organisation actually is and what motivates it: money.

Now those interests have a formidable new adversary: The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 teenagers and staff members were killed this month, according to authorities, with an assault weapon legally purchased by a troubled 19-year-old.

The students’ voices are powerful and persuasive. By Saturday, major companies were cutting financial ties with the gun lobby. The hashtag #VoteThemOut was targeting lawmakers with NRA affiliations who oppose meaningful gun-law reform. And Douglas students were vowing to push on.

No wonder the lobby is borrowing Trump’s moves, learned at the knee of Roy Cohn, his ruthless mentor and legal adviser: Always punch back harder than you got hit.

But the NRA is hamstrung. It can’t punch back with impunity at students who’ve lost their friends or are terrified to go to school. So the news media will have to suffice.

But the news media is a necessary foundation of American democracy.

Think of where we’d be, 13 months into the Trump presidency, without mainstream news organisations.

These rabid attacks won’t end — not by the President, not by the right-wing media, and not by the NRA.

But keep this in mind: The louder and nastier they get, the more you can bet the attackers are feeling the heat.