Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
One of the things that frustrates those who are involved in self defense issues is the media’s stance on firearms. According to many news stories, guns aren’t merely weapons but are instead demonic devices that force otherwise peaceful people who come in contact with them to explode into violence and slaughter the innocent.
What’s carefully left out of these thinly disguised op-eds is the fact that firearms in the hands of average citizens save many more lives than are taken by criminals.
Remember back when you were a kid. Did your Mom or Dad ever say that you were supposed to tell the truth if you did something bad? Own up to it and take your lumps?
If you’re a productive, supportive member of society then something like this must have happened. Personal responsibility is the lesson.
Cori over at Rantingprofs has the scoop. MSNBC reported that the lead judge in the upcoming trial of Saddam Hussein was assassinated. The spin was that Iraq was such a dangerous and out-of-control place that the terrorists can kill anyone, even someone who had been living under such extreme security measures that his identity was kept secret.
Cori points out that the author of the MSNBC report seems to have forgotten that the judge’s identity wasn’t so secret after all. It had been published by Robert Fisk.
It eventually turned out that the first reports were in error, and the judge was safe. That still doesn’t excuse what appears to either be an attempt to ignore the facts in order to present a negative image, or an effort to cover for a fellow journalist that put an innocent man’s life in danger.
By now, everyone who is interested has heard the tale of CNN news chief Eason Jordan. Jordan makes wild and unsubstantiated claims, big media ignore the story, and the blogs won’t shut up about it. Eventually Eason resigns in disgrace.
Bloggers like to say that they’ll replace MSM some day. Not gonna happen. We don’t have the resources to gather data, interview people, and get the stories out in a coherent way.
But Eason and Rathergate has shown what we’re good for. Keeping them honest, shining a thousand tiny lights at outrageously biased behavior and unsubstantiated claims until everyone notices.
So it’s important that we realize that we’re like a swarm of unpaid editors and ombudsmen, not the reporters who know how to get the goods. Unless we happen to be very lucky we’re not going to break the big story. Instead we’re going to make sure that uncomfortable truths aren’t buried in favor of some agenda.
Big media claim that we’re getting in the way. They say that we’re just a bunch of partisan hacks who wouldn’t know good journalism if it came up and bit us on the nose. The unrelenting harping of the blogs, they say, is making it harder for them to do their jobs.
Well, we might make it harder for MSM to do their job, but we’re also forcing them to do it right.
UPDATE
Ginny, one of my fellow Chicago Boyz, makes a wonderful observation in the comments below, comparing bloggers to old-style ham radio operators. She even manages to work in a reference to Libertarians. Well worth your time.
Law enforcement professionals have a wall that seperates them from their fellow man. A sucessful investigation of a crime is one that results in the arrest and conviction of the guilty.
So that means that the only thing that matters is evidence. Stuff that will convince the judge or jury that this guy did this crime beyond a reasonable doubt. The detectives can speculate all they want, but if they don’t have something to back it up then they leave it outside the door when they walk into a courtroom. If they don’t then they’ll probably lose the case and their credibility will be questioned the next time they come in front of the judge. What’s worse is that the perp will walk and go on to commit more crimes.
Of course, it’s an imperfect world. Sometimes a whole case is built on speculation, and sometimes someone is convicted when they shouldn’t be. We rightly see this as a miscarriage of justice, an instance when our society violates the very principles which make up its foundation. It’s where we all agree that the system breaks down.
So JibJab has a new flash movie up, poking fun at President Bush’ recent win and the Democrat’s disappointment with same.
Fair enough, but CNN’s Headline News is showing the movie in it’s entirety. They show it right before cutting to commercial, and then they lede with a report about violence in Iraq.
But that’s not really significant because they have a story every 15 minutes about Iraq, all of them negative. (I’m still waiting for them to air a positive report about the situation in Iraq. They might have in the past, but if so then it was so fleeting that I’ve never seen one.) I suppose the big question is why they wasted time with the JibJab movie when they could have devoted the time to yet more items that painted our efforts in a negative light.
No liberal bias to see here. Move along.