NY Daily News smears NRA’s Wayne LaPierre as a ‘terrorist,’ media focuses on Ted Cruz at Iowa gun range
NRA head is a terrorist?
Newsbusters summarized the media response to the shocking New York Daily News’s anti-conservative front page, which labeled Wayne LaPierre of the NRA a “terrorist.” Noting that CBS’s Nancy Cordes touted how “the always-heated gun debate has gotten personal. The New York Daily News…called the head of the National Rifle Association a ‘terrorist'” and NBC’s Hallie Jackson played up the liberal newspaper’s attack, as well as The New Yorker’s “provocative” cover targeting gun owners.
Cordes includes her mention of the New York Daily News’s “terrorist” smear of LaPierre in a segment on the California massacre “reignit[ing] debates over gun control, terrorism, immigration, and surveillance,” as CBS’ Scott Pelley put it during his introduction.
After her “gotten personal” line, the CBS correspondent noted that “Republicans insist the focus on gun control is misplaced. To drive the point home, Texas Senator Ted Cruz campaigned today at a gun range in Iowa.”
Jackson’s report on NBC Nightly News also zeroed in on Cruz’s visit to the Iowa gun range. She underlined that Cruz didn’t “call…off the campaign stop after the [California] attack.”
She followed her “provocative” description of The New Yorker’s cover and the mention of the Daily News front page by playing up statistics from Swiss-based Small Arms Survey:
HALLIE JACKSON: …Americans, who make up less than five percent of the world’s population, own more than 40 percent of the world’s guns, according to an international weapons research group — nearly as many guns as people now, and more sold recently. On Black Friday, a record number of background checks, coming at a time when many feel vulnerable.
ABC’s World News Tonight, Tom Llamas barely touched on the debate over gun control during his report on the 2016 campaign. He also highlighted Senator Cruz’s campaign stop, and noted that the Texas senator was “the other candidate surging, as the country grapples with the terror threat…[Cruz] expressing support for the right to bear arms by visiting a gun range in Iowa two days after a mass shooting in America.”
Llamas’s segment focused mainly on the latest CNN/ORC poll, which, in anchor David Muir’s words, revealed Donald Trump’s “sudden surge,” as well as “his biggest lead since getting into the race.” The ABC journalist also mentioned that this poll “revealing something else interesting: Trump, [Ben] Carson, [Ted] Cruz, [Marco] Rubio — even Jeb Bush — all in a statistical tie with Hillary Clinton.”
Full transcripts and more details over at Newsbusters
