What The Press Gets Wrong

It is an only-too-regular event to see reporters in the MSM refer to things about which their knowledge is severely limited. I particularly notice it when any reporter starts writing about guns, farms, motorcycles, cars, trucks, construction, the military, or airplanes. I am pretty well-versed on these things and can spot a guy who doesn't know what he is talking about.

From Just One Minute, Don't you love it when libs go hunting? This post refers to an an article from the New York Times that describes the problem that Michael Vick is having in getting back into the NFL. The main point of the original article is that like Jackie Robinson, Michael Vick is depicted by Jesse Jackson as a victim of owner collusion because he is not getting any job offers after serving time for dogfighting. Buried deep in that original article was the following comment that was picked up by Just One Minute:

For many, the nonnegotiable issue in the Vick case is cruelty to animals. But let’s climb off our high horses. We know many fans hunt. They track down innocent animals, blast them with shotguns, shoot them out of the sky with rifles — for sport. Some take off animals’ heads and mount them as trophies.

Perfectly legal.

But the issue here is that Vick served his time in prison for breaking the law. The issue is degrees of cruelty. Who is worse: someone who tortures in the name of sport and then apologizes, or the one who kills in the name of sport and continues to hunt?

An obvious dig at hunters and hunting, for sure. But shooting rifles at the sky? Now, all of us have picked up expertise from our experiences from work and hobbies and my experience as an upland hunter tells me that hunting birds with a rifle is pretty impractical as well as dangerous. I can't think of a single upland or waterfowl hunter who does it.

Now this may be considered nitpicking, but I don't think it is a stretch to infer the following;

• The Times writer is ill informed not only about upland hunting, but hunting in general.


• No editor caught it.


• It is still online even though a major blogger pointed it out.


• MSM reporters make stuff up to justify a silly (my opinion) point of view.

Twenty-five years ago I would have read this in a newspaper and would have personally noted this but would not have taken the time to write about it. The press would have gotten away with it. But now we have the internet and the great unwashed can speak out.

I was personally struck prior to the 2004 election that Sixty-Minutes ran with an erroneous story about President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service. No professional journalists discovered the false documents and it was amazing how long it took the MSM to actually pick up on it. But most noticeable was the number of guys that had expertise with typewriters and word processing programs who stepped up to investigate and report.

Face it, folks. We are a nation of specialists with expert skills and knowledge while the Main Stream Media is made up of generalists that have such a limited view that they see no reason to research the things they write about. Keep that in mind.

To finish here, I present my expertise on dogs. Here is Woodrow, the world's greatest bird dog, doing what he did in the late stages of his life. He helped raise two kids and was a good friend. I wonder what the Times guy would say about him.