Interesting NPR Conversation

After taking a good look at the sleazy MSNBC interview between daytime anchor Lisa Daniels and Texas Representative Susanna Hupp, I decided to contact National Public Radio's "On The Media" program (MSNBC no longer maintains an ombudsman or any way for mere mortals to contact them). I've found OTM to be a pretty perceptive, pretty hard-nosed group of journalists, and I thought they might be interested.

I was immediately contacted by John Soloman, a reporter for OTM, and we had a long, really fascinating discussion on the various aspects of both the "gun culture"—a phrase I actually like even though it was coined by antigun people—and media bias.

We kept swirling around a central question—is the readily evident media bias against firearms and gun owners the result of active intent or ignorance on the part of journalists? Frankly, I fall on the side of ignorance. That opinion is based on five years on the front lines of the firearms/media "war." We members of the gun culture have done an abysmal job in explaining ourselves to the media, then we seemed surprise when the media gets everything wrong.

The NSSF media education program went a long way toward correcting that problem, but it was expensive to run, time-consuming and a bitch to organize. The current iteration of the program is a much-reduced version of the original program; still, it's a miracle it survived at all. The problem, as always, is money. The elections drained everyone's coffers, and the problem with a media program (anyone's media program; this is not exclusive to the firearms industry) is that it is impossible to evaluate it using traditional return-on-investment accounting. The "return" part of the equation is ephemerial and doesn't lend itself to "dollarization." Still, the media education program was responsible for sidetracking and eventually killing a very antigun "dsocumentary" on the shooting sports; the program team handled the Maryland sniper crisis, which was a textbook case of how to handle a crisis (even the Brady people, according to my busy little moles, gave grudging credit to our team for stopping them at every turn).

Now, what are those two items alone worth to the firearms industry? What is it worth not to have to fight a major antigun documentary from a respected media outlet? What is it worth to have weathered a serious crisis with no major damage? And that's just two instances out of, quite literally, dozens.

Bottom line? The industry is amazingly short-sighted in believing it doesn't need a full-time, experienced media team! The shooting sports need that team. Hunting needs that team. We need this a lot more than much of the crap the industry lavishly supports (there's a huge redundancy in the multiple hunter recruitment and retention initiatives, for example; a single coordinated effort would, IMO, he muchmore successful as well as more cost-effective).

I'll keep you posted on what develops from OTM.