Gilbert Cranberg: HOW THE PRESS HELPED DEFEAT BACKGROUND CHECKS

I had lunch the other day with Marlow Cook, the former U.S. senator from Kentucky. Cook, a Republican, posed a troubling and profound question: “Why haven’t I seen photos of the crime scene in Newtown, Connecticut where 20 grade school children were shot to death?”

The answer, of course, is that editors try to shield readers from gruesome images. In the case of the Connecticut massacre, editors also may have wanted to spare the feelings of the victims’ families, though that would be a less compelling reason for papers distant from Newtown.

Whatever the reasons, the effect of the self-censorship was to make it easier for senators to vote the other day to effectively filibuster the background-check and other gun control measures they succeeded in sidetracking. Make no mistake, the press had a hand in that defeat by its failure to show, in full, the awful truth about the Newtown killings. 

It is in no way the job of the press to sugarcoat the news. When it assumes that role, invariably in the name of “good taste”, it does so by shortchanging the public, which is entitled to an unvarnished picture of the world. 

I often defend the press against charges of bias, but in at least one respect there is bias in the press. That bias is defined variously by editors -- the bias against poor taste. Because the bias is exercised by keeping things out of the papers and off the airwaves, the public isn’t even aware that paternalistic editors and news directors have been protecting them. And from what.

It was a mistake, several years ago, for editors to go along with the government’s effort to shield the public from pictures of returning caskets from Iraq. Just as it was a mistake in more recent days for editors to refuse to show graphically the horror of the gun violence in Newtown.