One of the biggest problems when it comes to productive and civil discussions about any topic these days is getting accurate and unbiased information.
Admittedly, because we’re all human and have our own personal biases, that can be difficult to do at times, especially when it comes to an issue that we’re passionate about. But we should try.
Which leads us back to the problem that I mentioned earlier: bias. In this case, the problem is bias in the legacy mainstream news media.
Now, bias on their part would be annoying but not so bad if they would have the honesty and decency to label opinion pieces as opinions or editorials and news as news and to not mix the two.
But they keeping mashing them together and calling all of it news.
Take a recent story about a horrible situation in Erie, Pennsylvania. The original story is bad enough. It’s about a mass murder / suicide. Awful, terrible stuff.
But in the article, Reuters piles on bias and inaccurate information on top of the original awful story.
Now, if you’re not familiar with Reuters, they are one of the two big news aggregators in the U.S. and, in my observation, the less biased of the two, if you can believe it after what I’m about to tell you.
Read the bias section from the article which I quote below, and see if you can spot what I’m talking about. Ann Saphir and Erin Banco write,
[Pennsylvania Governor Josh] Shapiro has long advocated for “common sense gun safety,” and pushed the Pennsylvania General Assembly in 2024 to pass gun reforms, including universal background checks and restrictions on ghost guns, which are homemade guns that lack serial numbers and cannot be traced. Several of Shapiro’s proposals have stalled in the state legislature.
There have been more than 400 mass shootings in the US in 2026, according to data compiled by Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more people are shot, excluding the shooter. The last recorded mass shootings in Pennsylvania took place in July in Philadelphia, according to the data.
Did you spot it?
We can start with the idea of “common sense gun safety” as the way that they describe gun control, but the ideas being pushed by Shapiro and people like him are not common sense and don’t increase safety.
Second, the “data source” that Reuters uses is the Gun Violence Archive which I’ve talked about here and in other articles. The GVA is an anti-2A propaganda organization using data out of context to try to push an agenda.
In other words, they’re a dishonest source which makes them a terrible source.
Let’s face it, we can’t trust the legacy mainstream media to tell us the truth. They only tell us what they want us to think, and I, for one, have better things to do than listen to their propaganda.
