C’mon, correspondents!!

by Tom Shafer

April 2, 2018

Okay, so I have had a long-standing issue with correspondents and news anchors, particularly in the political arena.  I know that they have/are provided a list of questions before they interview politicians and supposed experts in political science, but too often they stick to their scripts and don’t ask the probing questions that can potentially ferret out significant information — or truly clarify a person’s position about a specific controversy. 

Instead, they allow the interviewee to stick to talking points that have been regurgitated ad nauseam since time in memoriam.  A perfect example of this reigns in the NRA debate.  How many times have we heard the argument, “The only thing that stops a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun.”  Frequently, politicians who side with this position state after a mass shooting that “many common citizens with conceal-carry have stopped killers or mass shooters.”  All too frequently, the correspondents or anchors just move on to the next question and don’t point out the fallacy of that argument. 

The word “many” by definition typically indicates a minimum of three, so the next question asked should be this one: “Okay, if that’s your argument, can you name three common citizens who have stopped mass killers with their conceal-carry handguns?”  My contention is that few, if any, politicians could answer this question — because there are very few common citizens who have performed this feat.  Can you name three?

And this is just one example where our correspondents and anchors fail us.  C’mon, correspondents!!