On December 19, USA Today published an article titled “Guns marketed for personal safety fuel public health crisis in Black communities.” The byline of the “article” is “Fred Clasen-Kelly and Daniel Chang, KFF Health News.” Most people will not look at the byline. Fewer still will look into KFF Health News (formerly Kaiser Health News).
Even if someone did a quick fact check, they’d find that, in searches, both Google and ChatGPT refer to KFF Health News as an “independent” source of journalism. Specifically, Google says KFF Health News is “a nonprofit, editorially independent national newsroom.” Wikipedia says KFF “conducts its own research, polling, and journalism. Its website has been praised for having the ‘most up-to-date and accurate information on health policy’ … .’”
So, like The New York Times, KFF is an approved member of the mainstream or legacy media. In today’s too often politically charged media climate, that isn’t always a good thing. But most of USA Today’s 250,000 daily print and digital subscribers likely didn’t look that far; instead, most readers probably scrolled down on their phones and digested some or all of this carefully crafted approximately 2,500-word propaganda piece written to make people believe guns cause crimes.
They likely weren’t aware that KFF Health News is endowed by the Kaiser Family Foundation. This San Francisco-based foundation is currently worth about $800 million. It spends around $80 million annually. This “center-Left” foundation focuses on health-related issues. It claims not to do advocacy, but rather instead says it produces “journalism” that media outlets publish.
KFF is also supported, according to its website, by big-monied organizations on the Left, some of which often promote an anti-gun agenda, such as the California Health Care Foundation, Gates Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Silicon Valley Community Foundation and many others. They claim that funders do not influence newsroom decisions or content.
All that being noted, any astute reader who knows even a little about crime likely paused while reading this “article” and hoped that KFF does a better job with actual health-care issues than they did with this freedom issue.
After telling emotional stories about the victims of criminals, the article continuously claims guns were the cause, as if guns are not mechanical tools, but are instead evil, AI-driven robots in some dystopian plot.
After its first example, the article states: “Harris is one of tens of thousands of Americans killed or injured each year by gun violence, a public health crisis that escalated in the pandemic and churns a new victim into a hospital emergency room every half hour.”
This use of the term “gun violence” is left open, as if guns are, again, flying around causing mayhem. The article calls this a “public-health crisis” just as the Biden administration so often did; this is useful to the gun-control narrative because if guns are falsely perceived as a virus or disease then the government has a mandate to cleanse them from society.
The article goes on to blame the firearm industry for increasing production to sell to more people who are not “pale, male and stale.” (They took this phrase from a press release from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association for firearms manufacturers; in context, the association said, “Times, and gun ownership, are changing. Much to the chagrin of those who oppose lawful gun ownership, it is becoming increasingly difficult to paint the stereotype of today’s gun owner as pale, male and stale.”)
They then said that firearms companies are trying to, oh no, make a profit; and they noted that they are selling to all law-abiding Americans, regardless of race or other physical factor. (Isn’t treating everyone equally a good thing?) The authors of this KFF article spun this to say that gun companies have increasingly marketed products to“communities of color who are disproportionately victimized by gun violence.” (Again, you have to buy the author’s premise that guns cause crimes in order to swallow the spin that gun companies aren’t selling to good citizens who want to protect themselves, but are instead allegedly pushing instruments of death into challenged communities.)
The article even had political attacks on the Trump administration. It said that the Trump administration has “moved to reduce federal oversight of gun businesses” before delivering the line that the “pain of gun violence crosses political, cultural, and geographic divides … . Black men and boys are 6% of the population but more than half of homicide victims.” Their source for this statistic is the gun-control group Giffords.
They don’t next dig into who is shooting whom in these communities. They don’t talk about gangs, recidivist violent criminals or other issues. They simply blame guns and the firearm industry.
The authors of this KFF gun-control advocacy piece then say, “Washington has offered little relief: Guns remain one of few consumer products the federal government does not regulate for health and safety.” Their source for this false claim is the gun-control group the Violence Policy Center.
The article then descends into quotes from gun-control activists and more of the same.
They did include a quote and a link to an NRA video. The article noted that the NRA in “2020 posted on YouTube a four-minute video of a Black woman holding a rifle and telling viewers they need a gun in the pandemic. ‘You might be stockpiling up on food right now to get through this current crisis,’ she said, ‘but if you aren’t preparing to defend your property when everything goes wrong, you’re really just stockpiling for somebody else.’”
They then spun this very honest point to claim that this messaging caused “harm” by convincing more people to take their own safety seriously.
Then they got really nasty. They printed a claim from a report by the Joint Economic Committee Democrats that said the “firearm industry has marketed ‘to white supremacist and extremist organizations for years, playing on fears of government repression against gun owners and fomenting racial tensions … allowing the industry to profit from both white supremacists and their targets.’”
This is one-sided, gun-control advocacy masquerading as “independent” journalism in “America’s Newspaper.” It isn’t balanced or even well thought out. For this anti-freedom propaganda to work, it requires a deep ignorance within the paper’s audience; the thing is, a lot of alternative media are now filling in the rest of the story.
Perhaps, to understand why we are living in such divisive times, mainstream-media members should look in the mirror and consider the yellow journalism they are publishing as straight news.
