Dylan Byers @ Politico:
If you thought President Obama was outraged after the Senate killed the plan to expand background checks on guns, you should have seen some members of the press.
Even by the standards of today’s partisan media environment, the response has been noteworthy. Television hosts, editorial boards, and even some reporters have aggressively criticized and shamed the 46 Senators who opposed the plan, while some have even taken to actively soliciting the public to contact them directly.
The decision by some members of the media to come down so firmly on one side of a policy debate has only served to reinforce conservatives’ longstanding suspicions that the mainstream media has a deep-seated liberal bias.
“I guess the liberal media get annoyed when Senators listen to their constituents and think for themselves, rather than doing the media’s bidding,” Bill Kristol, the editor-in-chief of the Weekly Standard, told POLITICO.
”It’s clearly biased and unmistakably ideological,” said John Podhoretz, the conservative New York Post columnist. “These outlets can do what they do want, but nobody should kid themselves about what they’re doing.”
Conservatives are doubly frustrated because amid all this cheerleading, the media largely turned a deaf ear to one of the right’s central substantive arguments: There is little evidence that the Manchin-Toomey plan could prevent another Aurora or Newtown — a fact many reports glossed over. Indeed, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein recently stated on the Senate floor that universal background checks, while “very important… would not have been prevented the tragedy in Newtown.”
Nonetheless, leading media figures and outlets still tried to shame the Senate. CNN’s Piers Morgan, a longstanding gun control advocate, called the Senate “a pathetic, gutless bunch of cowards.” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said the American people had been “insulted,” and called it “a turning point in the history of the Republican Party.” The New York Times published a scathing editorial from Gabrielle Giffords, who accused the Senate of being “in the gun lobby’s grip,” and the Huffington Post splashed the images of shooting victims across the top of its homepage below the headline: “No Justice.”
No doubt propagandists get incensed when an intense, concentrated, calculated emotion manipulating campaign calling for people to support the infringement of their rights fails. Let the violins play.
I’d say that knowing the full political ire of the MSM would rain down on them following their votes, requires courage. Some politicians have not forgotten what happens when they go against the will of voters who will not forget and who will come out in force to protect their rights. I say screw all these progressive MSM talking heads and their online sock puppets.