Tag Archives: Multiple Victim Shooting

The mainstream media’s biased coverage of the Family Research Council shooting

From Newsbusters.

Excerpt:

ABC was the only broadcast network that offered a full story on the FRC office shooting on Wednesday night. They led with the story and gave it two and a half minutes. None of the network newscasts reported the breaking detail that shooter Floyd Corkins volunteered for six months at the D.C. Center for the LGBT Community, adding depth to his political motivation.

On NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams gave the story just 17 seconds: “In Washington today, police say a man with a gun walked into the offices of the conservative lobbying group the Family Research Council, and opened fire. He never made it past the lobby. He shot a security guard in the arm before the guard was able to subdue him.”

On CBS Evening News, substitute anchor Bob Schieffer offered 20 seconds: “A gunman opened fire today at the Washington headquarters of the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian lobbying group. The man shot a security guard in the arm before that guard and others tackled him, and he was arrested. Police say that the suspect made negative comment about the council’s work just before the shooting.”

[…]On both NBC and CBS, the FRC brief was followed by a full story promoting President Obama’s new deferral program for illegal alien “Dream Act” students. NBC gave that two minutes, CBS two minutes and fifty seconds.

I think the lesson here is that you shouldn’t let the mainstream media be your only source of news. It would be interesting to compare their views of the Family Research Council to the views of the shooter, to see how much difference there really is between them.

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Family Research Council shooting suspect volunteered at gay community center

From the Associated Press. (H/T Legal Insurrection)

Excerpt:

A man suspected of shooting and wounding a security guard at the headquarters of a Christian lobbying group on Wednesday made a negative reference about the organization’s work before opening fire, a law enforcement official said.

Police said the man entered the front lobby of the Family Research Council in Washington around 10:45 a.m. Wednesday, began arguing with a security guard and then shot him in the arm. The gunman was subdued by the guard and others and taken into custody but had not been charged as of Wednesday evening.

Another law enforcement official identified the suspect as Floyd Corkins II, and authorities were interviewing Corkins’ neighbors in Herndon, Va., near Washington. Both officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation.

Corkins, 28, had been volunteering recently at a community center for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

The Family Research Council strongly opposes gay marriage and abortion and says it advocates “faith, family and freedom in public policy and public opinion.”

Corkins made a negative comment about the organization before the shooting, but the reference was not specific, one of the law enforcement officials said.

[…]Corkins had been volunteering for about the past 6 months at The DC Center for the LGBT Community, said David Mariner, executive director of the community center, which is in Northwest Washington. He usually staffed the center’s front desk on Saturdays, and his most recent shift was about two weeks ago.

[…]”Today’s attack is the clearest sign we’ve seen that labeling pro-marriage groups as ‘hateful’ must end,” Brian Brown, the president of the National Organization for Marriage, said in a statement.

In my previous post on the shooting, I listed some examples of the violence and vandalism committed by gay activists against those who believe that every child should have a mother and a father to take care of them as they grow up. (That’s “hate speech”, according to many gay activists) I also pointed out in that post that the Human Rights Campaign leaked the names of pro-family donors to the Huffington Post. Incidentally, the Human Rights Campaign labels the Family Research Council as a “hate group”. The Southern Poverty Law Center says that the Family Research Council is a “hate group”. I wonder if Floyd Corkins II also agrees with them that the Family Research Council is a “hate group”?

My secular case against same-sex marriage offered three reasons why people should oppose gay marriage apart from any religion. One of those reasons was the danger that gay activism poses to religious liberty and freedom of speech. I never in my life thought that it would go as far as what happened at the Family Research Council.

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White House and left-wing media take hours to comment on FRC shooting

From Life News. (H/T Wes)

Excerpt:

The White House is coming under criticism from pro-life advocates for not issuing a condemnation of the shooting of a security guard at the offices of the Family Research Council, a pro-life group.

UPDATE: Not until after 6:30 p.m. ET did the White House respond. Obama finally commented, saying “this type of violence has no place in our society.”

Meanwhile, CNN took hours to finally issue a report on the shooting and it provided no live coverage of it as other television networks did. Hours later, CNN tweeted, “Shooting wounds guard at Family Research Council. on.cnn.com/OYEXq9.”

Several conservatives bemoaned the late coverage, as Twitchy noted:  “Disgusting…FYI It’s not breaking news two hours later” and “Oh? Look who decided to “break” some news.”

Conservative writer Mary Katherine Ham writes: “There is no mention of the shooting on either CNN’s Twitter feed or its website as of 1:52 p.m. EST. The bullpen at Townhall.com has been watching CNN coverage since the time of the shooting and has seen no mention of it. The shooting news is on MSNBC’s website.”

Wes also sent me this comparison of the FRC shooting coverage by Fox News with the coverage of MSNBC.

This isn’t the first time that the left-wing news media has done this.

Excerpt:

According to published reports, when Larry Brinkin was arrested two weeks ago, the police found… [CENSORED BY WK]. Yet the media has barely reported this terribly disturbing incident.

But, you ask, who was Larry Brinkin? He was “a central figure in the gay rights movement,” a man who was so influential that, “The San Francisco board of supervisors actually gave a ‘Larry Brinkin Week’ in February 2010 upon his retirement.” It was Brinkin who first used the term “domestic partnerships” in a legal dispute, marking a watershed moment in gay activist history, yet news of his alleged crimes against infants and children, not to mention his alleged White Supremacist leanings, has received very little media attention.

Is there a double standard here? Imagine what the media would be doing if Brinkin had been a conservative Christian leader.

When evangelical leader Ted Haggard fell, the media was quick to pounce, suggesting that this exposed the corrupt nature of evangelical Christianity as a whole. And media leaders have done this repeatedly whenever there has been a scandal connected to an evangelical (or Catholic) leader, and the news is blared from the headlines. But where, I ask you, is the outrage or the front page news when a gay leader commits atrocities such as those allegedly committed by Larry Brinkin? And why isn’t the media claiming that Brinkin’s transgressions expose the corrupt nature of gay activism as a whole?

The failure of a Christian leader is considered endemic and representative; the failure of a gay leader is considered an aberrant exception. Why the unequal treatment?

[…]The answer is that Brinkin’s arrest has received relatively little media attention because he was a gay activist leader, not a conservative Christian leader, and there is no hiding the mainstream media’s pro-gay, anti-conservative Christian bias. And because Brinkin’s arrest has not been widely reported, the general public has not been confronted afresh with the horrors of child pornography.

[…]Brinkin, for his part, was no smalltime player, with the San Francisco Examiner describing him as an “iconic San Francisco gay activist who brought the nation’s first domestic partnership lawsuit in 1982.” And he was, after all, a respected, long-term leader within the Human Rights Campaign, the world’s largest gay activist organization. Why hasn’t the HRC been tarred and feathered the way evangelicals (or Catholics) are after one of their leaders falls? Why the inconsistency?

I reported on the Larry Brinkin scandal in a previous post.

We expect the left-wing media to be biased. Studies and surveys have shown that they cannot be trusted to tell the truth about the news. But the Obama administration? Aren’t they supposed to represent all the people.

Consider this article from Hans Bader, at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt:

Discrimination and politically-correct blinders can be deadly. It was obvious in the aftermath of the Fort Hood shootings that the killer was inspired by Islamic extremism. Obvious, that is, to anyone but officials in the Obama administration, who continue to cling tightly to a culture of political correctness and preferential treatment that helped make the shootings possible.

Nidal Hasan shot dead 12 soldiers and a civilian at Fort Hood, while shouting “Allahu Akbar.”  But the Obama administration’s inquiry into the shootings falsely suggested Islamic extremism was not a factor in the shootings.  Its report on the Fort Hood massacre did not even “mention the words ‘Islam’ or ‘Muslim’ once,” referring to the killer simply as the “alleged perpetrator.” Instead, it claimed the tragedy resulted from “bureaucratic shortcomings” in the “sharing of information.”

[…]The shooter’s Islamic extremism was obvious.  Prior to the shooting, he had said that Muslims should rise up against the military, “repeatedly expressed sympathy for suicide bombers,” was pleased by the terrorist murder of an army recruiter, and engaged in hate-speech against non-Muslims, publicly calling for the beheading or burning of non-Muslims, and talking “about how if you’re a nonbeliever the Koran says you should have your head cut off, you should have oil poured down your throat, you should be set on fire.”  “In addition, Hasan openly had suggested revenge as a defense for the 9/11 attacks, defended Osama bin Laden, and said his allegiance to his religion was greater than his allegiance to the constitution.”

But the military did nothing to remove him from a position where he could harm others. Although his views were common knowledge, “a fear of appearing discriminatory . . . kept officers from filing a formal written complaint,” the Associated Press noted. Moreover, “a key official on a review committee reportedly asked how it might look to terminate a key resident who happened to be a Muslim,” as NPR noted.  Instead, the military effectively exempted Hasan from rules of conduct that apply to everyone else, in order to promote its conception of “diversity.”

As military attorney Thomas Kenniff notes, there was a climate of “obsessive political correctness” in the military. As Major Shawn Keller pointed out, in a column entitled “An Officer’s Outrage Over Fort Hood.” “There was no shortage of warning signs that Hasan identified more with Islamic Jihadists than he did with the US Army. . .But just like September 11, those agencies and individuals charged with keeping America and Americans safe failed to connect the dots that would have saved lives. Jihadist rhetoric espoused by Hasan was categorically dismissed out of submissiveness to the concepts of tolerance and diversity. . . . the leaders in Hasan’s chain-of-command failed to act . . . out of fear of being labeled anti-Muslim and receiving a negative evaluation report.”

Indeed, even after the shootings, government officials worried more about the fate of “diversity” than about the lives of their troops:  “Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength,” Army Chief of Staff George Casey told NBC’s Meet the Press. “And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse,” Casey said.

My secular case against same-sex marriage offered three reasons why people should oppose gay marriage apart from any religion. One of those reasons was the danger that gay activism poses to religious liberty and freedom of speech. I never in my life thought that it would go as far as what happened at the Family Research Council.

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