We'll take a look at two pull quotes, and see what we can see.
First up:
Speaking following a meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, whose country has been ravaged by gang violence supported in part by gun trafficking into Mexico, Obama vowed to return to the issue of gun control in the United States.
Okay, what does this paragraph want to tell us? Oh, yes, there it is: Mexico has been ravaged by gang violence supported by gun trafficking. So guns are bad. What doesn't it want to tell us? Two things pop up off the top of my head:
1) Guns are already illegal in Mexico. Not only are guns illegal, even owning a bullet is illegal. So tighter gun control is obviously not being particularly helpful there.
2) The man giving that speech was the one responsible for much of the "gun trafficking in Mexico." Readers of this blog, and other Conservative blogs, have heard of Operation Fast and Furious- the scheme whereby Mexican drug games were given guns by our own government with no method of tracking. Those same guns were used to murder over 300 Mexican citizens, and at least two American citizens. The man in charge of that operation- or at least who should have been in charge and should be fired for incompetence if he didn't know about it- is Eric Holder. His boss is Barack Obama.
Okay. Second pull quote:
And in an article published Wednesday, the proposal’s Republican author, Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, suggested that politics were afoot in many GOP senators’ decision to oppose the package.
“There were some on my side who did not want to be seen helping the president do something he wanted to get done, just because the president wanted to do it," Toomey told local newspaper editors.
What does this quote want to tell us?
Oh, GOP "political" obstruction. Got it.
What doesn't it want to tell us? Again, I've got two off the top of my head, feel free to add more in the comments.
1) While some GOP Senators may have opposed it simply because SCOAMT wanted it, a) that's actually a pretty good starting position, and b) that doesn't include all of those who were told in no uncertain terms that anything less than strong opposition would get them de-elected.
2) That there is any possibility that there could be actual policy objections to the law. By casting GOP opposition to the law as "political," the reporter is able to ignore the possibility that there are any substantive objections to the law.
Once again, simply checking for bias shows the one-sided coverage rampant in the Media Complex. These are all points which are germane to the debate, and they didn't take me any thought at all to remember. An unbiased media, or a media who at least attempted to address their bias, would have included the points, at least as "by-the-ways." NBC would rather you forget about them all together.
