11/17/03
More discussions on the biased media coverage of the Appalachian Law School Attack

Bernie Goldberg's new book, Arrogance, has a whole chapter that discusses how the media covered the Appalachian Law School attack. Just as I expressed concern about the media coverage in an op-ed piece and later in my book, The Bias Against Guns, a questioner notes that Goldberg comes to the conclusion that "But one of the themes you explore in your new book is that there are some cases, on some issues, where it's really quite hard to conclude that the bias is not deliberate, particularly in the case of guns used for self-defense." Goldberg did his own Nexis search that came to a very similar conclusion to what I obtained and he points to similar Nexis and Westlaw searches that were also done by James Eaves-Johnson. Goldberg notes that despite his concerns about the media, "It just didn't make any sense" that the media could so universally hide the fact that guns were used defensively to stop this attack, but that his Nexis search reached "basically the same conclusion. And I said, 'Nah. You cannot have either a hundred or two hundred papers and only less than five of them reporting that the guys had guns who subdued the gunman. Can't be.'"

There are now three additional searches after the one that I did that get extremely similar results. Goldberg has appeared on everyplace from the Rush Limbaugh radio show on November 7th (a subscription is required to listen to the archived shows) to an interview with Tim Russert on CNBC on November 15th where Goldberg discussed the Appalachian Law School case as an example of media bias. I thought that Goldberg was quite effective in both cases and it is nice to see that the work that I did is receiving this level of attention.

Additional discussions on questions raised about the media coverage of the Appalachian Law School case can be seen on my web site at the posts for 9/11/03, 9/06/03, and 7/04.03.