CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey thinks it’s significant that Newtown shooter Adam Lanza “refused to identify himself by a gender when registering at college.” So much so, in fact, that Jeffrey devoted a chunk of his April 8 article on the subject to documenting how few media outlets have covered it:
In the week that has passed since CBS News first reported that Lanza had refused to identify his gender, this particular fact has attracted almost no notice elsewhere in the U.S. media. A Lexis-Nexis search of all English language news–with the terms “Lanza” and “I choose not to answer”–brings up only four citations.
Two of those citations are transcripts of the April 1 edition of CBS Evening News. A third citation is for the April 2 edition of CBS Morning News, where the information about Lanza was reported again. The fourth citation is a story in the Daily Mail, a British paper that cited the CBS report on April 2.
A Google search of “Lanza” and “I choose not to answer” shows that the New York Daily News on April 2 mentioned that Lanza had declined to specify his gender to Western Connecticut and that USA Today also did so on April 5.
Also missing from that list of media that allegedly failed to cover this: CNS. A search of “Lanza” and “I choose not to answer” in the CNS database uncovered no results.
That’s right — Jeffrey is complaining about lack of coverage of a story that he himself couldn’t be bothered to cover until he devised the hook of other media not covering it.
But now that Jeffrey has finally covered it, CNS is desperately trying to turn it into a thing:
- An April 9 CNS article by Fred Lucas stated that “Vice President Joe Biden Tuesday highlighted gender among other characteristics a gun purchaser must fill out on a background check form after reports that the Newtown, Conn. school shooter refused to identify his gender on a college form.”
- In another April 9 article, Patrick Burke asked Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow, “Should refusing to disclose gender be a disqualifier for seeking a firearm.”
None of this, of course, has anything to do with anything important. CNS is trying to manufacture a controversy over something CNS itself ignored until it figured out how to use it as a cudgel.