Deltoid

In the Washington Post article Lott says:

“I probably shouldn’t have done it—I know I shouldn’t have done it —but it’s hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously,”

Well, I can think of one.

Last January, the New York Post published an opinion piece written by Lott. In that piece Lott claimed that a school shooting had been stopped by students armed with guns and that almost all the newspaper stories had failed to mention this fact, thus demonstrating that the media showed a bias against guns. Next, someone posted the Lott piece to Usenet. A long discussion ensued, with a gentleman named Ed Huntress criticising Lott for failing to mention that the students with guns had actually been police officers, and Mary Rosh stoutly defending Lott. In February, Lott’s piece was published in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram with one and only one significant change: the addition of these words:

Many stories mentioned that the heroic students had law enforcement or military backgrounds

Mary then posted this version (artfully claiming that there were a “couple” of significant differences) and suggested that the New York Post had edited out that phrase to make the piece fit in the available space. Mary also demanded that Ed Huntress call Lott and apologize since the error was the New York Post’s fault. Ed called Lott and reported back:

I talked to John Lott and learned that he hasn’t even seen the New York Post’s edited version of his editorial.

That’s just a brief summary. You should read the whole discussion to really appreciate what an enormous lie Lott told.

So, what big advantage did Lott obtain by his Mary Rosh deception? He made a major omission from his piece. Instead of having to take responsibility for his actions, he was able to blame the New York Post.

This isn’t the only time that Lott has attempted to get out of a jam by rewriting history. Consider:

• the story that the 98% came from a never-before revealed survey after years of attributing it to other sources and the denial that he ever attributed to other sources.
• the attempts to change the story he told Lindgren and the insistence that he had not changed his story.
• changing the story about the survey so that it took one month to complete instead of three months after writing: “I am willing to bet that I don’t start mentioning this [98%] figure until the spring of 1997. If I use it before I said that I did the survey, I will say that they nailed me.”

All this suggests that Mustard’s late recollection that Lott had told him in 1997 that he had done a survey may have been caused by Lott insisting that he had definitely told him then and Mustard being less resistant than Lindgren to Lott’s history rewriting.

A couple of weeks ago I described how Lott used his Mary Rosh sock puppet to blame the New York Post for the fact that an article he wrote omitted to mention the fact that the students who captured a school shooter were police officers.

A couple of months later, however, in Lott published his article again, without mentioning that the students were police officers. So we have proof not only that the Post was not to blame for the omission, but that the omission was quite deliberate and not accidental.

The centrepiece of Lott’s The Bias Against Guns is the story he tells about the shootings at the Appalachian Law School. According to Lott, after killing three people Peter Odighizuwa was almost out of ammunition and was on his way to his car to get more when he was confronted by two armed students, Tracy Bridges and Mikael Gross. When Bridges aimed his gun at Odighizuwa Odighizuwa dropped his gun and was tackled by students. Lott opines that Bridges and Gross “undoubtedly saved many lives”. Lott says that the biased media mostly suppressed this story, with only four stories out of 208 in the week afterwards mentioning that the students were armed. He also tells us that he spoke to reporter after reporter who knew about Bridges and Gross’ actions but did not report them.

Lott’s claims were picked up by others, with commentators such as Larry Elder, James Eaves-Johnson and Donny Ferguson all seeing it as proof of media bias. In a Houston Law Review article Eric Luna thought it demonstrates

the willingness of certain individuals or groups to skirt the truth or disregard all other considerations when issues of guns and gun control are at stake.

Unfortunately, Lott’s counting methodology is flawed, his count missed half of the stories that mentioned the armed students, his version of what happened deliberately omits important facts and omits contradictory accounts from other eye witnesses and his version contains details that appear to have been invented by Lott.

First, let’s check Lott’s work in counting news stories.

I did my own search on Factiva of all the stories appearing in the week following the shootings. I found eight stories (twice as many as Lott found) that mentioned the students having a gun. Next, in his 208 stories, Lott has counted the same stories over and over again. Many papers printed the Associated Press story by Chris Kahn and Lott has counted it each time it appeared. He has also counted stories about completely different aspects of the matter—there is no reason for a story about one of the funerals to have mentioned a defender’s gun.

To address this problem I did my own count by reporter (so all stories by a particular reporter were only counted once), and only counted stories that mentioned how Odighizuwa had been apprehended.

The result? 28 different reporters wrote about the shootings and 8 mentioned the defender’s gun. There was also a striking pattern—stories on the 17th of January (the first day of coverage) tended not to mention a defender’s gun, whereas later stories did. In fact, four of the reporters who did mention a gun later also wrote stories on the 17th of January which did not mention the gun. Clearly those reporters did not leave out the gun in their first story because of a bias against guns—they simply did not know about it yet.

If you examine stories written on the 18th of January or later, there are ten stories, six of them mentioning a gun. That leaves only four stories that might have been expected to mention a defender’s gun. Let’s look at each of them:

1. Mike Oduniyi All Africa News
   This story seems to have been written for Africa News because Odighizuwa was Nigerian. Oduniyi looks to have written his story from the news stories of 17 Jan and doesn’t seem to have talked to anyone himself. No evidence that Oduniyi knew about a defender’s gun.
2. Alfonso A. Castillo. Newsday
   This story was about the murdered dean. Castillo just mentions in passing the police report of how Odighizuwa was apprehended. No evidence that Castillo knew about a defender’s gun.
3. Paul Dellinger Roanoke Times & World News
   This story was about the memorial service. Dellinger talked to Mikael Gross about one of the murder victims and identified Gross as one of the students who tackled Odighizuwa. No evidence that Dellinger knew about a defender’s gun.
4. Maria Glod The Washington Post
   Talked to Gross about the shootings. Did not mention that he was armed.

So there’s your bias. One reporter who didn’t mention the defender’s gun when she probably should have. Maybe she is biased, but you can’t conclude that from just one example.

Now let’s look at the facts Lott deliberately left out of his account of what happened: Rick Montgomery in an article in the Kansas City Star wrote:

The Star recently interviewed two students involved—Bridges and Besen. They gave differing accounts.

Bridges repeated that he pointed his weapon at Odighizuwa and ordered the suspect to put his own down, which he did.

According to Besen, the first student to tackle the suspect, nothing of the sort happened. He said Odighizuwa set down the gun and raised his arms—”like he was mocking everyone: ha, ha, what are you going to do now?”—before the students confronted him.

The two armed students had not yet arrived at the scene, Besen said: “Peter had no knowledge anyone had a gun.”

Virginia State Police confirmed Odighizuwa’s weapon was empty by then.

Police spokesman Stater said the armed students did assist after Besen and another student, Todd Ross, tackled the gunman. Bridges sat on the suspect while Gross, also armed, provided handcuffs he had gotten from his car.

But to Stater’s view, the biggest heroes were Besen and Ross—the unarmed men who lunged at Odighizuwa.

Alas, they weren’t the focus of attention when a writer and photographer for an NRA magazine came to the campus to interview the armed students.

Bridges said they took his picture; NRA spokesman Gregory said, “It was nobody from our staff.”

It’s all gotten way too political for Besen.

“I’m a gun advocate, but it really irritates me that people are trying to use this as a (political) plug,” he said. “The NRA is minimizing the tragedy that happened here. I don’t appreciate it.”

Lott is well aware of these facts because he selectively quotes from this very article. He knew that Besen contradicted Bridges account but did not mention this fact at all

And not only does he deliberately suppress inconvenient facts, he invents new ones to make his argument more compelling. Even though the Kansas City Star and many other stories report that Odighizuwa’s gun was empty, Lott specifically claims that Odighizuwa was not out of ammunition. That lets him claim that armed citizens “undoubtedly” saved many lives.

Lott also prints a quote from Kent Markus, taken from a Legal Times article:

“The gun lobby, without much sensitivity or attention, has distorted   what actually happened for their own political benefits, I think it   is a shameful exploitation of a tragedy.”

Lott writes:

  “However, when I called up Markus to find out exactly which facts he   was referring to, he was unable to provide me with any details.”

I contacted Markus to find out if Lott had accurately reported their conversation. Like everyone else who I have contacted about conversations reported by Lott, Markus informed me that Lott had greatly distorted what was said. Markus actually told Lott exactly what facts he was referring to—that witnesses had told him that Odighizuwa was disarmed before the armed students returned. He also refused to tell Lott the names of the witnesses because he felt that they had suffered enough unwanted attention and he did not want Lott badgering them. Presumably this refusal was translated into Lott-speak as “unable to provide me with any details”.

So again we see that Lott was well aware that Bridges story about using his gun to disarm Odighizuwa was in dispute, but he did not mention this.

This also explains why the stories published on 17th January did not mention the armed students—none of the other witnesses were aware of their guns, either because their guns played no role in the story, or all of these witnesses somehow did not notice them.

This isn’t the first time that Lott has omitted important details of this story to help his argument. In his original op-ed on the shootings Lott left out the fact that the students were police officers.

The tale Lott spins: “Armed citizens save many lives; media suppresses this fact” seems to resonate with pro-gunners and many seem to accept it, turning off their powers of scepticism. Trouble is, his tale isn’t true.

My thanks to Tom Maguire for sending me the link to the Kansas City Star article and prompting this investigation.

Tom Spencer believes that I have essentially destroyed one of Lott’s core arguments and wonders why pro-gun people continue to support him.

There are two contradictary stories about what happened at the Appalachian Law School:

• Besen said that Odighizuwa set his gun and a clip on a light fixture about four feet off the ground before Bridges arrived.
• Bridges said that he aimed his gun at Odighizuwa and then Odighizuwa “throwed his weapon down”.

Note that they contradict each other about what Odighizuwa did with his gun. If Besen is correct and Bridges arrived after Odighizuwa put his gun down, then Bridges may not have seen what Odighizuwa did with the gun.

I asked Rick Montgomery (the Kansas City Star reporter) what the police report said about where Odighizuwa’s gun was found and he told me that it agreed with Besen’s account. This suggests that Bridges arrived after Odighizuwa had put his gun down and Bridges imagined or invented the details of what Odighizuwa did with the gun.

I also note that Besen doesn’t seem to have any motive to lie here, while Bridges’ story makes his role in the affair much more important.

So the most plausible theory is that the Bridges’ gun did not have a significant role in the affair, not that media bias suppressed its role.

Tom Maguire has an interesting post which collects some links to blogspace discussion about the Appalachian Law School shootings.

One interesting thing is that Lott and Kopel independently made the same error—they both claimed that the New York Times did not mention the defender’s gun when it did. Both errors were particularly egregious. Kopel quoted a sentence from the article but did not notice that the gun was mentioned in the very next sentence. Lott counted the New York Times story as one of the four that mentioned the gun, but also claimed that it did not mention the gun. I think this is evidence of bias on their part. They were so sure that the New York Times wouldn’t mention the gun that they didn’t notice that it had. (To be fair, both of them have corrected this particular error.)

Maguire doesn’t think things look good for Lott and wonders

whether some Lott supporters or gun enthusiasts have attempted to rally a convincing counter-argument. Presuming, of course, that there are Lott supporters (probable), and plausible counter-arguments on this incident (doubtful).

Mark Kleiman has taken the anti-Lott side. How do we rally the pro-Lotters? Are there any?

Pro-Lott bloggers seem to have given up defending him. William Sjostrom did say he was going to write something, but nothing has been forthcoming.

Lot has an article in the National Review Online where once more misleads his readers about what happened at the Appalachian School of Law:

“Last year, two law students with law-enforcement backgrounds as deputy sheriffs in another state stopped the shooting at the Appalachian Law School in Virginia. When the attack started the students ran to their cars, got their guns, pointed their guns at the attacker, ordered him to drop his gun, and then tackled him and held him until police were able to arrive.”

Lott implies that the law students were former deputies when they were actually deputies at that time. While the two students were armed, only one of them claimed to have pointed a gun at the attacker, and his account is disputed by other witnesses. Lott never mentions this fact. More details are here.

After Lott claimed that biased news coverage of the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law deliberately omitted a defensive gun use, I did my own analysis of the news stories and found that the alleged bias was the product of Lott’s flawed counting methodology. Lott has posted a spreadsheet listing 295 articles he found on Nexis, and a file containing 249 of those articles. Some of those articles he does not count because they are duplicates. He asserts that the coverage was biased because only 3 out 218 stories mentioned that the attack was stopped by armed students. Some of the differences in our counts are because we used different sources for the articles (Factiva vs Nexis), so I’ll redo my analysis using the articles Lott posted. I’ll count things in the same way if possible to see why we get different results.

I indexed and categorized the articles and placed them here. Lott has not counted stories that are exact duplicates from his count, but if two versions of a story are slightly different he counts both of them. For example, he counts this and this as different stories, even though they are almost the same. In order to be as consistent as possible with Lott’s counts, I will count duplicates the same way as him in the analysis below.

After removing the stories Lott marks as duplicates, I am left with 198 articles. Of these, nine mention a defender’s gun. (Lott counted seven—he seems to have missed two of them.)

Next, I leave out stories about the funerals and students being released from hospital, leaving 124 stories stories that mention how Odighizuwa was apprehended,

Rex Bowman of the Richmond Times Dispatch wrote a story on January 17 that stated “fellow students tackled and subdued him”, and then on January 18 wrote another story that stated “Odighizuwa … was wrestled to the ground by fellow students, one of whom aimed his own revolver at Odighizuwa”. Obviously the reason why Bowman didn’t mention the gun on the 17th wasn’t because he was biased against guns, but because he hadn’t learned about it. The only stories that could potentially exhibit bias against guns are those that appeared on the 18th or later. There are 25 such stories. Some of these stories don’t have any bylines and appear to have just been rewritten from wire service accounts. If reporter’s biases are removing references to defender’s guns, then we need to look at the original stories and not the ones without bylines. That brings us down to 14 stories by eight different sets of authors. I’ll look at each of these authors to see if any show signs of bias.

Chris Kahn

Kahn actually mentioned the defender’s gun in another story, so the claim that he deliberately concealed this information is impossible to sustain.

Mike Oduniyi

This story seems to have been written for Africa News because Odighizuwa was Nigerian. Oduniyi looks to have written his story from the news stories of 17 Jan and doesn’t seem to have talked to anyone himself. No evidence that Oduniyi knew about a defender’s gun.

Michael Beach

This story appeared in an Australian newspaper on the 18th when it was still the 17th in the US. It is based on the wire service reports on the 17th. No evidence that Beach knew about a defender’s gun.

Alfonso A Castillo

This story was about the murdered dean. Castillo just mentions in passing the police report of how Odighizuwa was apprehended. No evidence that Castillo knew about a defender’s gun.

Brian Hicks

Another story about the murdered dean which mentions the police report in passing. No evidence that Hicks knew about a defender’s gun.

Paul Dellinger

This story was about the memorial service. Dellinger talked to Mikael Gross about one of the murder victims and identified Gross as one of the students who tackled Odighizuwa. No evidence that Dellinger knew about a defender’s gun.

Adam Laskar

This story is about one of the murdered faculty. It summarizes the wire service reports of the 17th. No evidence that Laskar knew about a defender’s gun.

Maria Glod

Talked to Gross about the shootings. Did not mention that he was armed.

My basic result does not change. There was only reporter whose account could possibly be construed as biased against guns. Lott makes it appear that there is bias by counting all the reports from the 17th and 16th when the reporters did not know about the defender’s gun, and also counting all the stories that were about completely different aspects of the shootings.

Lott has a posting responding to my comments on his claims that the news coverage of the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law was biased. I wrote:

Unfortunately, Lott’s counting methodology is flawed, his count missed half of the stories that mentioned the armed students, his version of what happened deliberately omits important facts and omits contradictory accounts from other eye witnesses and his version contains details that appear to have been invented by Lott.

Lott has no answer at all to almost all of this, so he just responds to part of the criticism about his counting methodology. He once again deliberately omits mentioning Ted Besen’s contradictory account that strongly suggests that the guns were not used to stop the attack. He also carefully avoids mentioning or linking to my posting so that his readers won’t find out what Besen said. And remember that Lott is well aware that Besen and other witnesses say that Odighizuwa had dropped his gun before the armed off-duty policre officers arrived on the scene—he selectively quoted from Mathews’ article, he talked to Markus Funk who told him the same thing and now he is responding to my posting where I stressed the same fact.

It is hypocritical for Lott to accuse reporters of deliberately concealing facts while deliberately concealing facts himself. In a separate posting I redo my analysis using his set of articles and get the same results as before, but the most important thing to notice is the way Lott keeps avoiding mentioning that the “fact” of defensive gun use that he accuses the media of deliberately suppressing, actually isn’t a fact.

Here’s what I wrote about his counting methodology

I did my own search on Factiva of all the stories appearing in the week following the shootings. I found eight stories (twice as many as Lott found) that mentioned the students having a gun. Next, in his 208 stories, Lott has counted the same stories over and over again. Many papers printed the Associated Press story by Chris Kahn and Lott has counted it each time it appeared. He has also counted stories about completely different aspects of the matter—there is no reason for a story about one of the funerals to have mentioned a defender’s gun.

Lott reponds with

The general claim is that there are nowhere near 208 unique stories and that in order to get that number I must have counted each time an AP story appeared as a separate story.

He pretends that the only criticism of his counting methodology was about counting the same stories multiple times and ignores the part about him counting stories on different aspects of the matter.

Lott counts this story on Today as one of the stories where the media suppressed the “fact” of defensive gun use, but Tracy Bridges, who later claimed to have used his gun to disarm Odighizuwa, was speaking live on TV. It wasn’t that a reporter chose not to report the defensive gun use, but that Bridges never mentioned it. Given that other witnesses insist that there was no defensive gun use, it seems most likely that his first account, told to Today was accurate and that when talking to reporters later that day, he embellished the story and invented the defensive gun use.

Glenn Reynolds links to this Dave Kopel article and says that it shows that the New York Times reporting on guns was “riddled with amateurish errors and apparent deception”. Speaking of which, here is Kopel:

What if a gun owner does something very unwicked—such as saving dozens of people from a mass killer? Don’t expect to read about it in the New York Times. When a failing law student went on a murder rampage at Appalachian School of Law, Times reporter Francis X. Clines explained that the killing ended when the killer “was tackled by fellow students” (Jan 17, 2002). “Mr. Odighizuwa was subdued by three law students who were experienced police officers, the authorities said,” Cline wrote. What Clines and the Times omitted was that two of the law students who “subdued” and “tackled” the killer had retrieved their own handguns from their cars, and had used those handguns to “subdue” the murderer.

and this is what Clines wrote in the New York Times story (emphasis added):

Mr. Odighizuwa was subdued by three law students who were experienced police officers, the authorities said.

“We’re trained to run into the situation instead away from it,” said one of the three, Mikael Gross, 34, of Charlotte, N.C., who ran to his car for his bulletproof vest and service pistol before tackling the suspect.

That’s right, it was in the very next sentence and Kopel somehow failed to notice it.

None of this is new—Kopel admitted that the error was indefensible and posted a correction on The Corner some three months ago. Trouble is, the NRO hasn’t bothered to add a correction to the article. Is this an amateurish error or an apparent deception?

Update: Glenn Reynolds has an update where he notes that failure to correct errors in articles is a common problem at NRO. He also writes:

Notably, however, Lambert doesn’t try to defend Fox Butterfield.

I didn’t write anything about Fox Butterfield because I don’t know whether the charges are true or false. At the moment I have neither the time nor the inclination to investigate the matter. Given Kopel’s egregious error about another matter in his article, I am not going to take his word for it.

Further update: Tom Maguire examines the first thing Kopel writes about Butterfield and finds it wanting.

On his blog, Lott offers an excuse for the fact that in his book and on his blog he had not mentioned that Ted Besen contradicts Bridges’ claim to have used a gun to disarm Odighizuwa:

I have gotten an e-mail asking about the role that Ted Besen played in stopping the Appalachian Law School attack during January 2002. While I had seen and referenced a story by Rick Montgomery, a reporter for the Kansas City Star, I hadn’t read down to the last couple hundred words of the 1,400 word piece that he published in March 2002. Montgomery’s piece contains a quote from Besen claiming that the attacker put his gun down before Mikael Gross and Tracy Bridges arrived at the scene. (Montgomery has seen copies of everything that I wrote on the incident and he has never mentioned these facts to me.)

The story about the Appalachian School of Law shootings is Lott’s best example of media bias against guns. He devotes several pages to it in his book and presents his version of what happened whenever he gives a talk promoting his book. Montgomery’s article in the Kansas City Star is one of only two news stories on the allegations of bias in the coverage and Lott quotes extensively from it. The other, longer, article appeared in Legal Times and Lott read to the end of that one, because he quotes the last sentence, and even telephoned the person quoted in that sentence to obtain more information. Lott also wrote a lengthy response to my first analysis where I quoted the entire last part of Montgomery’s article.

Given all of this, is Lott’s claim not to have read the last part of Montgomery’s article even slightly plausible? And even if we believe his claim, why should we believe his claims about new stories being biased when he can’t be bothered to read all of each news story?

Lott goes on to argue that of the news stories that mention Ted Besen “not one of the stories provide information that is consistent with what Besen told the KC Star”. This is not true. Of the 14 stories that mention Besen the only ones that are not consistent with Besen’s account are the three stories that mention that a gun was used to disarm Odighizuwa. Indeed, the whole point of Lott’s discussion is that there were only three such stories put of hundreds of stories covering the matter. One of the stories that is consistent is Bridges’ interview on the Today Show. These are Bridges’ own words, on live TV:

We seen the shooter, started to approach him, stopped at my vehicle, and got out my handgun, and started to approach Peter. At that time, Peter throwed up his hands and throwed his weapon down.

Note that he does not say that he pointed his gun at Odighizuwa—that detail was added later.

Lott also states:

One explanation that appears consistent with both Bridges’ comments and Besen’s later statement in the KC Star is that Besen was closer to the attacker than either Bridges or Gross and wouldn’t have clearly seen what Gross and Bridges were doing.

This is not consistent with Besen’s statement. Besen said that Odighizuwa put the gun down before Bridges and Gross arrived. That is, he saw Odighizuwa put the gun down and he saw Bridges arrive and Odighizuwa put the gun down first. Recall that Besen and Bridges were police officers who were together when the shooting started. Besen would certainly have been on the lookout to see when Bridges arrived to support him.

Note also that none of the accounts from other witnesses like Jody Mitchell, Robert Deatherage, Jack Briggs and Todd Ross mention any defensive gun use. It seems unlikely that they could have all missed it.

Update: In the account he gave on the Larry Elder Show Bridges said:

“We were located in the classrooms just across from where the first professor was shot. We heard the first three shots. At the time, we didn’t really know that it was gunfire. Just a few seconds later, we heard the next three shots, followed by some screams. Another student and I went into the hallway. We ran into a professor and he said that Peter (the gunman) was in the building and that he was shooting. So I ran back to the classroom and, what students were left, I said you all need to get out—there’s a shooter in the building.

“We exited out the back stairwell of our building. As I exited, that day I was running a little late, so I did park in a faculty parking spot, which put my vehicle between me and the shooter. We saw him in the front yard there. I stopped at my vehicle and got my handgun out.

“As we approached Peter, I started giving him a lot of verbal commands. … I told him to drop his weapon, to get on the ground. … His back was to us, and once he turned around and saw that I had a weapon, he laid his weapon down and stuck his hands in the air. At that time we approached him, and there was somewhat of a struggle, but we took him to the ground and handcuffed him until the authorities got there.”

The student he was with was Ted Besen and Bridges is saying that he and Besen approached Odighizuwa together. How could Besen possibily be unaware of what Bridges was doing?

(All of my postings on the shootings at the Appalachian School of law are here.)

Lott has a report of a conversation with Mikael Gross on his blog. In The Bias Against Guns Lott claims that Gross pointed his gun at Peter Odighizuwa:

Only two local newspapers (the Richmond Times Dispatch and the Charlotte Observer) mentioned that the students actually pointed their guns at the attacker.

So does Gross confirm that he pointed his gun at Odighizuwa? Nope. Does he confirm that Bridges pointed his gun at Odighizuwa? Nope. The best he can do is:

What Gross knew of the attack was “consistent” with Bridges’ statements, though Gross was unable to see Bridges during a good portion of the attack.

So, although Bridges claims that he pointed his gun at Odighizuwa, there are no witnesses who saw him doing it. We have eyewitness accounts from Mikael Gross, Ted Besen, Jody Mitchell, Robert Deatherage, Jack Briggs and Todd Ross and none of them say they saw Bridges point a gun at Odighizuwa.

This bit is interesting, too:

Gross never really personally knew Besen when they were both at the law school, but he did get to know Bridges through their membership in the Federalist society

That is the same Federalist Society that is pushing a pro-gun agenda by sponsoring a speaking tour by Lott. It seems that Bridges and Gross have political motives to make the most of the role defensive guns played in the shooting.

Lott continues to insinuate that Besen changed his story, waiting two months and then adding the detail about Odighizuwa putting his gun down before Bridges arrived. In fact, it is Bridges who has changed his story. In his first version, told to the Today Show, Bridges mentions his gun, but says nothing about pointing it at Odighizuwa. Besen’s story has not changed. He didn’t mention that Odighizuwa put his gun down before Bridges arrived, because that fact was not important until Bridges starting claiming to have pointed his gun at Odighizuwa and Bridges did not make that claim until later.

Lott’s favourite example of the “Bias Against Guns” is the story of the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law. Lott performed a superficial analysis of the news stories about the shootings and found that very few of the stories mentioned the fact that two of the students involved in apprehending the killer were armed. Lott concluded that reporters deliberately left out this fact because they were biased, but my more careful analysis finds that the first stories published did not mention the guns because the reporters did not know about them, while the later stories were about different aspects of that matter.

Bernard Goldberg has a new book Arrogance where he makes the same argument and repeats Lott’s superficial analysis. He was interviewed on CNBC by Tim Russert on Nov 15:

Mr. GOLDBERG: That’s—that story, Tim—you know, I told you I don’t believe in conspiracies, but this one makes me wonder. Early last year a student at the Appalachian Law School in Grundy, Virginia, went on a shooting spree. He killed a bunch of people. He killed three people, including the dean and a professor and a—a student and shot and wounded three other students. It’s a blue-collar law school, so a lot of the students there have jobs. And two of them had jobs in law enforcement. When they heard the shooting—and the campus was running all over the place. People were ducking for cover and everything. This guy was just shooting up the place. They went to their cars and got their guns—and—and I did a lot of reporting on this, and tracked down one of the major figures involved, and they walked up to the guy with their guns from two different directions, these two students, and they said, ‘Put down your gun,’ and—and then they wrestled him to the ground.

In fact, only one student, Tracy Bridges said that he pointed his gun at the killer. Goldberg neglects to mention that Bridges’ account is disputed by Ted Besen, who says that the killer put his gun down before Bridges arrived and that there are no witnesses who saw Bridges pointing the gun.

I got a call from a criminologist, a scholar—a scholar, who said that he had done a search on the computer and found 204 stories on this, and only four mentioned that the students who subdued the gunman, who tackled the gunman as—as all the papers and networks put it, also had guns. I didn’t believe that. That could not be true; four out of 200. So I did a little research on my own, and I found some guy at the University of Iowa who ran two separate studies, and he came up with pretty much the same numbers, pretty much. I didn’t believe it. I did my own study. I went to Nexis and found the 100 biggest news organizations in America, which included the networks and the—and all the big papers, that covered the story, and I found six. Four of them in the area, making it a local story for them—six that reported that the two gunmen—that the two students also had guns to subdue him. They didn’t simply tackle him. They didn’t simply subdue the guy. They used guns.

Of course, the scholar he refers to is John Lott.

And I was—I was saying to myself, ‘Why would you leave out such a crucial piece of info—that is crucial. All I could come up with is that, since many reporters are liberal—most—almost all are liberal—and since many liberals don’t just not like guns, but they’re anti-gun, to—to do a story that says guns sometimes—sometimes are used to prevent more violence, sometimes guns are used defensively for good, that just didn’t fit the preconceived notions. And by the way, that’s what the book is about, the preconceived notions that reporters come to the story with. And on guns, the preconceived notion is simply guns are bad.

Or if he had taken a little care in his analysis, he might have noticed that, for example, reporter Rex Bowman did not mention the guns in his Jan 17 story but did mention them in his Jan 18 story and figured out that Bowman didn’t mention them on Jan 17 because he didn’t know about them. But then Goldberg would not have had this example for his book.

By the way, I think America is broken up into two groups about guns, so I’m going to give you my own bias. I’m not a gun person. I don’t like guns. But I’m not anti-gun. I wish everybody on my street, where I live in Miami, has a gun. You know, I think it would be a safer place if everybody had a gun. But that—that goes beyond, you know, just group think. That almost goes to group lying.

RUSSERT: But now when you raise this issue—I’m immediately curious, did the students actually fire their guns?

Mr. GOLDBERG: No.

RUSSERT: Were their guns in their cars?

Mr. GOLDBERG: Yes.

RUSSERT: Were they bringing their guns to school?

Mr. GOLDBERG: Yeah.

RUSSERT: Were they licensed guns? I mean, it’s a whole sidebar story.

Mr. GOLDBERG: That’s right. By the way, the—there’s a sidebar I did not put in this book, but I’ll tell you—and I should have. I didn’t learn about it till later. When—when somebody involved in looking into this called the Associated Press and spoke to a major, major editor there, and said, `Your guy didn’t'—talking about the Associated Press, ‘Your guy didn’t put this in his story,’ the editor was shocked, but not shocked because his reporter left it out of the story, shocked that these other students had guns that they brought to campus with them, and then put—took them out of their car, and God knows what might have happened if these two guys started shooting. That’s what he was shocked about.

Now this comes from a story (registration required) by Rick Montgomery in the Kansas City Star on the controversy about the media coverage of the shootings. Unlike Goldberg, Montgomery presents both sides of the debate, so Goldberg must be well aware that Besen contradicts Bridges’ account and that reporters did not mention the gun because they did not know about it. If Goldberg had bothered to tell his readers about these facts it would have undercut his message about media bias, so he just left them out. Montgomery’s story presents both sides of the question, while Goldberg’s is deliberately one-sided. Goldberg complains about media bias when the bias is his own.

You know, Tim, I said there are slivers of sunshine, but when I even hear myself telling stories like this, I say these guys are so arrogant. They better wise up. They better wise up because if they don’t change, they’re going to become the journalistic equivalent of the leisure suit; harmless enough but hopelessly out of date.

Goldberg needs to wise up. He can no longer get away with deliberately distorted accounts in his books because some blogger will check the facts and expose him.

RUSSERT: It is so important when you have an issue like guns, now matter how you feel, the fact is, the National Rifle Association does represent a sizable number of Americans…

Mr. GOLDBERG: Oh, yeah.

RUSSERT: …state their opinion accurately, and Americans for Gun Control have their view. Put both views out there and let people make their own decision as to how—where they come down.

Mr. GOLDBERG: But people get angry. There was one guy who went on a Web site and he really started putting stuff out that the gunman had already put his gun down before the students went up with their guns. That’s not totally true. The students came up with their guns. They said, ‘Put your gun down.’ The st—the guy had run out of bullets, was in the process of putting his gun down. He may have been going to the car to get more bullets. The fact that they had guns, these other students, no journalist could argue that that’s not relevant. Yet only six news organizations out of the top 100 reported that the subduers, the tacklers—tacklers—had guns.

“One guy who went on a Web site”? That would be me. (If you google for “Appalachian School of Law”, my blog shows up in the first page of results.) Notice how he just says “putting stuff out” rather than saying that I was reporting the eyewitness account of Ted Besen. And if Goldberg had bothered to read all the stories about the shootings he would have known that the killer did not have more ammunition in his car.

In another interview, Goldberg repeats the story and adds this detail:

And then I found one of the guys, Tracy Bridges, one of the students and had a long talk with him. And he told me—he said, ‘I spoke with about a hundred reporters. I told every one of them what happened.’

This is interesting. Last year Bridges said he spoke to over 50 reporters. Now the number has grown to a hundred. If Bridges embellished his account of the number of reporters how do we know he didn’t embellish his account of his gun use? After all, the first time he told it, he didn’t saying anything about pointing his gun at the killer.

The incomparable Bob Somerby takes Goldberg apart for more outragously misleading writing in Arrogance here, here and here.

Bob Somerby nails Bernard Goldberg’s repetition of Lott’s false claim that the media deliberately concealed defensive gun use in the shootings at the Appalachian School of Law.