By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Anthony Esolen once wrote that it’s not just what kids are being taught in school these days, it’s what they’re not being taught.
The same goes for the media. When it comes to credibility, they’re running on empty. But old habits die hard, and a lot of us grew up believing the “news.” These days, it’s a bad habit — and a hard one to break.
Take “gun control.” Spurred by occasional reports of school shootings, it’s close to the top of the repeat offenders list.
A year ago a former student killed seventeen people at the Marjory Stoneman High School in Parkland, Fla. Immediately, demands for gun control flooded the national media. Town halls and marches were held everywhere. Gun-control groups made Parkland student David Hogg an instant celebrity. It worked: Hogg was recently accepted at Harvard, edging out thousands of students whose SAT scores were significantly higher than his own.
By Parkland’s first anniversary, gun-control groups boasted that 67 new gun laws were enacted in 26 states and Washington, D.C. Would any of those laws have prevented Parkland? Unfortunately, no. Because Parkland was not caused by guns. A mixture of politics, incompetence, cowardice, and outright lies allowed this tragedy to happen. The media, however, forgot to report that.
The Florida State Commission investigating Parkland released an exhaustive report last December, describing a stunning series of failures. Consider: The day the shooting occurred, Broward County Officer Scot Peterson “waited 45 minutes (not a misprint) to enter the school and warned others to stay away, too,” the commission reported.
Peterson is now known as “the Coward of Broward.” Captain Jan Jordan, his superior in charge of the operation that day, also failed miserably. Why? To put it bluntly, she was an incompetent affirmative-action hire. And Sheriff Scott Israel? He was a political hack who “revealed following the shooting that his agency [had] received 18 tips about the suspected gunman prior to the incident” — and done nothing.
After the report was released, Israel was suspended by Florida Gov. Rick Scott.
And don’t forget school superintendent Robert Runcie. He lied repeatedly. He feared that Broward’s schools might lose valuable federal funding because an Obama diktat told schools they couldn’t punish minorities more often than other students (the shooter qualified as a minority).
Clearly guns didn’t cause the Parkland shootings. Rather, cowardice, politics, incompetence, evasion, and outright lies caused this tragedy. But the media never told us.
Headlines We Never See
“Colorado Catholic Student Murdered By Obama Fan Who Hates Christians; Accomplice Is Transsexual Child of Illegal Alien Felon.”
Remember seeing that headline? Neither do I. Media outlets did report some basics. In Colorado on May 7, Alec McKinney and Devon Erickson burst into a classroom at STEM High School Highlands Ranch near Denver and started firing. Eighteen-year-old student Kendrick Ray Castillo immediately lunged at the shooter, taking fire as he knocked the shooter off balance so other students could subdue him. Several other students were shot as well, but survived. Castillo died of his wounds. He was universally hailed as a hero.
And the shooters? First, Devon Erickson, 18. “A registered Democrat (according to Colorado records), [he] shared a post that expressed admiration for former President Barack Obama and shared a post that strongly criticized President Donald Trump. He also expressed hatred for some Christians,” Heavy.com reported, adding that he advocated “gay pride.” On his Facebook page he wrote, “You know what I hate? All these Christians who hate gays.” As Julia Duin points out, few media mentioned that. Nor did they notice that he had “666” and a pentagram spray-painted on the hood of his car.
Second, Alec McKinney, a 16-year-old biological female who has changed her name from Mya to Alec and now calls herself a male. McKinney was born when her mother Morgan was sixteen; Morgan married Mya’s father, Jose Quintana, six years later. Quintana, an illegal alien from Mexico, had been deported twice and imprisoned for over a year for domestic violence against Morgan. Duin writes that “Alec’s Instagram handle was ‘thatgaykidalec’ and that his mother ‘hates the new Alec’ and that he missed his dad. So here’s a girl who doesn’t get along with her mom who’s transitioning to be a boy who is without a dad,” she wrote.
All this information was available to the media, says Duin, but not reported. Few even mentioned that Kendrick was an active Catholic who often volunteered with his father at Knights of Columbus events. And forget the LGBTQ anti-Christian angle. That just wasn’t news.
This media bias syndrome is tiresome, to be sure, but we can’t stop calling it out. And that bias is everywhere. The inconvenient facts revealed regarding the Parkland and Colorado sullies the luster of the media’s message that guns are the killers, not people.
The Plague Of
Fatherless Homes
The media seldom investigate the impact of fatherless homes like McKinney’s. Recall the Sandy Hook shooting in December 2012, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza murdered twenty students and six teachers after killing his mother at their home.
The media reported on this tragedy non-stop, but they didn’t tell the whole truth about Adam’s family. In fact, to this day his Wikipedia entry tells us that “he was taken out of high school and home-schooled by his mother and father.”
But in fact, eleven years before the Sandy Hook shooting — when Adam was nine — Adam’s father Peter, a very successful Manhattan businessman, dumped his wife and moved in with his girlfriend closer to New York. However, because his wife had multiple sclerosis, they did not divorce. She was thus able to rely on his health insurance policy at GE Capital to pay for her expensive care.
Yes, Adam Lanza grew up in a fatherless home, yet that telling factor meant nothing to the secular media, because they realize that simply telling the truth would invite speculation based on the simple natural law of cause and effect: Dad leaves home, child goes bad.
“In 1960, fewer than one in 10 children lived in a single-parent home,” writes Dr. Patrick Fagan. Well, those days are over. Today, intact families are a minority. And, urban legends aside, fatherless homes are a much more dependable indicator of the likelihood of a life of failure, poverty, and crime than either race or economic status.
Dr. Fagan’s in-depth studies reveal that “when family intactness, other demographic controls, and education controls are tested side-by-side with race and ethnicity, race and ethnicity have a marginal adverse influence.”
Indeed, fatherlessness is so ubiquitous today that it is largely unnoticed. But don’t think the kids don’t notice. Fagan describes the damage wrought by fatherlessness on children:
“Life without a father also is a good way to miss out on the American Dream. The poverty rate for all children in married-couple families is roughly 7 percent, NIH data show. By contrast, the poverty rate for all children in single-parent families is 51 percent.”
He follows up with some astounding findings:
“Marriage is also the safest place for women and children. Justice Department figures show that mothers who never marry are abused at three times the rate of married, separated, and divorced couples combined. Children are six times more likely to be abused in a step-family, 13 times more likely in a family with a single mother living alone, 20 times more likely in a cohabiting natural family, and 33 times more likely if they live with their natural mother and a boyfriend who isn’t their father.”
Of course, the media never tell us that either. We should ask them why.
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