State of the Media

A graduate student at the University of Houston recently uncorked the Armed Citizen Project, which may be a first-in-the-nation program, with the goal of distributing free guns to people in Dallas, Houston, and Tucson, Arizona (where Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot, 13 bystanders injured, and six killed in a 2011 assassination attempt).

The group, which is applying for nonprofit status, has already handed out at least 10 shotguns and will probably enjoy profile-building support when Wayne LaPierre and the National Rifle Association alight in Houston for the NRA’s national convention in May.

But the gun-giving group appears to have already achieved a side goal: unquestioning media coverage of its suggestion that the giveaway is designed to allow the group to “analyze” what happens to crime rates when guns are injected into Texas communities.

From the website: “The Armed Citizen Project is a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to training and arming residents in mid-high crime areas with defensive shotguns, for free! In training and arming law-abiding residents, we are saturating neighborhoods with defensive weapons and measuring the effect that a heavily armed society has on crime rates. We are an organization that is not simply content to hold the line on guns. We are also training and arming single women in high crime areas, competing against gun buybacks, calling out anti-gun politicians as being pro-crime, and fighting the anti-gun establishment in general.”

When the organization launched earlier this year, several news venues quickly ran with the story. Houston’s CBS affiliate did a generally upbeat piece anchored by the assertion that the gun giveaway is really all about sociology and criminology: “A University of Houston graduate student says he’s conducting a study to hopefully answer the question being debated across the country, ‘Do more guns reduce crime or not?’’’

Dallas’ CBS station concentrated a good portion of its feature report on an elderly black resident of South Dallas who endorsed the distribution of free guns, which are apparently paid for through donations to the group. The story went on to consider the attributes of the 20-gauge shotguns being handed out. Gun aficionados claimed that shotguns are “the most effective” weapons for home protection, no matter the shooter’s competence.

“Even if you are off, you’re still likely to have something in your target,” a Dallas gun promoter told the station. Almost as an afterthought, there was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it 10-second soundbite glued to the end of the report from a resident who said she just doesn’t like guns at all.

Then, in March, the group sent out another press release: “It is with great pride that we announce our new Anti-Rape Kit Initiative, in which we will be providing shotguns, ammunition, and training to vulnerable women in high crime areas free of charge… With our Anti-Rape Kit Initiative, we will aid in the reduction of the backlog of untested rape kits, by providing clear, direct, severe, and permanent consequences for the crime of rape.”

Almost instantly, Houston radio station KTRH posted a link: “If you are interested in signing up to get a free shotgun and training or want to donate click here.”

Finally, the Dallas Observer invoked a bit of healthy skepticism when it wondered whether the organization was really more interested in “trolling liberals” than arming citizens, and suggested that the group’s website hints at the giveaway’s real aim. The Observer’s piece noted that the group’s site says, “We are pissing off all of the right (left) people,” and “having a blast doing it.”

And to date, it doesn’t appear that any news accounts in Texas have explored the online endorsements the group has received from survivalist forums, or the founder’s LinkedIn page, which indicates he’s worked with the Houston Young Republicans, Ted Cruz’s Senate campaign, and Win Florida 2012 (a group dispatched from Texas to Florida to get out the vote for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan).

Bottom line: Kyle Coplen, the 29-year-old student who started the whole thing, seems to be having fun messing with the Texas media. In an interview later scooped up by Stephen Colbert, Coplen told Current TV (the only news outlet that has seriously tried to grill the group) that he’s having a ball.

“It makes me feel great. I get up every morning with a pep in my step, giving out guns . . . living the dream.”

Access to public documents is the bedrock of investigative journalism. The godfather of modern reporting in America, I.F. Stone, built his reputation parsing the endless reams of neglected paperwork churned out by government bureaucracies, then using the often-overlooked documents against the government that produced them, resulting in a series of incriminating scoops.

Austin-based Ken Martin, a feisty 70-something former Marine who runs a small investigative news website called TheAustinBulldog.org, has helped kindle a fire that could spread around the state, and might prove that the tools of Journalism 2.0 have leveled the media playing field more than most people realize.

Two years ago Martin began an aggressive one-man campaign to see if he could ferret out personal emails sent by Austin City Council members that might relate to public matters. Martin filed requests under the state’s Public Information Act asking for the emails, and when the city dragged its feet in response, a friendly lawyer filed suit, arguing that the public has the right to know if city council members are negotiating the public’s business in private.

The case ping-ponged back and forth, but in the end the city coughed up some of the correspondence, validating Martin’s belief that residents of Austin and other Texas cities are often subject to what he calls “government in the shadows.”

Martin’s lawyer, Bill Aleshire of Austin, is now working with attorneys in El Paso who are trying to obtain another batch of city council and city manager emails that might be tied to public business—in this case, communications dealing with a controversial plan to bypass a public vote and speed construction of an expensive new downtown baseball stadium in El Paso.

The Texas Attorney General’s office—rightly insistent on municipal compliance with the Texas Public Information Act—has been at war with El Paso city attorneys who have claimed that the act’s transparency rules are unclear, and that not all the requested documents need to be released.

Adding more evidence that non-mainstream sites like Martin’s Austin Bulldog are stealing journalistic thunder from Texas’ so-called legacy outlets, an El Paso website has sprung up to bird-dog the emerging El Paso documents. It’s called Chucoleaks.org, and it describes itself this way: “Born out of the exposure of the downtown baseball stadium scandal, Chucoleaks is the regional aggregator of El Paso City Council records City Council does not want you to see.”

For his part, Martin is waiting to see whether other citizen journalists will challenge other Texas cities on similar grounds—perhaps Dallas Area Residents for Responsible Drilling, which has already used open-records requests to keep an eye on natural gas operations in and around the city.

“To allow officials to evade turning over the records of public business conducted on private devices and accounts would be to gut the Texas Public Information Act and permit the public’s business to be done in the shadows, instead of in sunshine, where it belongs,” Martin says.

But a 2012 study by The Center for Public Integrity (conducted by Kelley Shannon, a Texas media stalwart formerly with the Associated Press) reveals that there remains a lot of work to be done before Martin’s brand of investigation becomes commonplace in Texas. Shannon discovered that certain Texas cities consistently petition the Attorney General’s office seeking exemptions from release requirements. Dallas suburbs including McKinney, Garland, Mesquite, Plano and Arlington were among the places most prone to resisting open-records requests. (The AG’s office has referred to Dallas as a “repeat offender” in its resistance to public–records requests).

Despite such stonewalling, Martin is optimistic that citizen journalists will continue to pursue city officials.

“No one is asking for and no one wants access to a public official’s private correspondence,” he says. “We ask only for electronic communication exchanged with others about public business.”

Martin also expects his strategy to become contagious: “I hope it’s a virus that spreads rapidly.”

As the New Year uncorks this month, let’s imagine that you are just emerging from a very long self-imposed exile.

It began 50 years ago, after President Kennedy was killed in Dallas. The awful news drove you into hiding, and you vowed not to come out until half a century later.

Maybe you felt that an unquestioning and unblinking media had allowed a reactionary toxicity to wash over Texas.

Sure as hell the media will be different in 50 years, you thought, and hopefully more skeptical.

Now here it is, 2013, and you’re stepping back into the light to read today’s reporting—seemingly endless news space devoted to men complaining about a “socialist” administration and a union-loving president.

Texas should secede.

Liberal judges are rewriting the Constitution.

The president is a megalomaniac, a liar, a weak-willed rube . . . a limousine liberal morphing into a damned socialist. He is consolidating power in the White House.

What else?

Federal appointments are going to people who are only picked because they are “diversity candidates.”

The government is giving away free money to people who don’t need it, or deserve it.

The country is threatened by people who are not praying enough in schools, and who are not monitoring the dangerous books being read in public schools.

There is an invasion coming from Mexico that threatens our way of life, our jobs and our families.

A thought wells up: I read the same exact headlines 50 years ago.

 

I’ve been lucky to work recently with the brilliant Texas journalist/historian/writer Steve Davis (he did Texas Literary Outlaws, a wise look at some of the great Texas reporters) on a long investigation into media and right-wing hysteria in Texas from 1960 to 1963.

The project involves an acute examination of the way the state’s journalists covered events back then, and the ways in which they gave unquestioning credence to the anti-liberal, anti-socialist hysteria propelled by a small handful of people and organizations, basically enabling those voices to hijack the national dialogue.

Bellowing social conservatives and anti-Kennedy zealots in Texas—Gen. Edwin Walker, Rev. W.A. Criswell of Dallas’ First Baptist Church, and University of Dallas President Robert Morris (arguably even more fervid in his communist witch-hunting than Sen. Joseph McCarthy)—had their vitriol validated by constant, non-skeptical media coverage.

And as the media gave such extremism credulous coverage, it also gave it political oxygen.

Exhuming the old stories, Davis and I discovered time and time again that if you pull John F. Kennedy’s name out of the vilifying items that appeared in countless news outlets—excepting The Texas Observer and certain courageous newspapers serving black Texans, such as The Dallas Express—you can substitute the name Barack Obama and instantly update the dateline to now.

In the stories suggesting that Texas and the nation were under threat from socialists, simply plug in “the Tea Party” for “the John Birch Society.”

What you see, then and now, is an unquestioning media and a paucity of journalistic investigation into who is bankrolling the anti-White House and pro-deregulation movements, and what their real (profit-driven) agendas are.

Fifty years after Kennedy was killed, has anything changed?

There were countless stories in 1963 featuring aggrieved Dallas energy titans complaining about over-regulation, and claiming that Washington socialists were tax-happy martinets out to squelch the state’s entrepreneurial soul.

There were even dirt-digging stories slamming the president for “hiding” his personal history from voters.

Molly Ivins would have responded on point: Why offer the lying zealots so much acquiescent ink? Why not, instead, investigate the holy hell out of them?

University of Texas at Austin professor Don Carleton wrote a great book called Red Scare! that looks at how, just a few decades ago, a small group of Texas pre-tea partyers basically commandeered the state’s airwaves, front pages, city councils and school boards, and were allowed by a willing media to hyperventilate about creeping liberal conspiracies.

Fifty years later, as Yogi Berra said, it’s déjà vu all over again.