The Media Research Center’s Kristine Marsh writes in an Aug. 9 post:
Earlier this year, CNN irresponsibly gave positive coverage to an illegal immigrant hiding from ICE in a liberal sanctuary church in Colorado. One week ago, that same immigrant killed a father of five in a car accident, while driving recklessly without a license. As usual when these things happen, the only thing you hear from the media is crickets.
It’s not like the MRC would dare to anything similarly irresponsible, right? Oh, wait, it has.
In 2013, the MRC gave positive coverage to Cody Wilson, a man who uploaded to the internet plans for a plastic pistol largely undetectable by security systems and can be made using a 3D printer. Kyle Drennen mocked TV panelists for “hand-wringing” over the development by “the usual group of liberal pundits,” and Matthew Balan huffed that a CBS segment on the gun blueprints featured “Democratic supporters of the proposal, and … failed to include any soundbites from gun rights supporters.”
Last year, Wilson’s name came up again when 3D-printed gun blueprints again became available. Ashley Rae Goldenberg complained that a pro-gun regulation group called Wilson a “self-proclaimed anarchist” and noted that “The U.S. Department of State reached a settlement with Defense Distributed, whose founder, Cody Wilson, was accused of violating the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) because, by nature of being online, the files to construct a gun could be downloaded anywhere. Nicholas Fondacaro, meanwhile, wenty into full-on sneer mode to defend Wilson:
For days, the liberal media have been experiencing a Chernobyl-level meltdown about a Texas company releasing online instructions for 3D printing plastic weapons that actually fire real bullets. Of course, none of them did their homework and spewed inaccurate nonsense in an effort to stoke public fear of guns. After a liberal judge in Seattle blocked the release on Tuesday, the broadcast networks sang their praises with one network touting Democrats who said President Trump had blood on his hands.
[…]Meanwhile, on the CBS Evening News, reporter Tony Dokoupil sat down with Wilson and assailed him with a question about how “when somebody downloads a gun from your website with your blueprints and kills somebody with it, how are you going to feel personally?” “If I allow you to download an AR-15, the full plans on the AR-15, I don’t believe that I provide you anything other than the general knowledge of what an AR-15 is. I am no different from a publisher of information,” Wilson shot back.
Dokoupil was so ignorant about how easy and legal it was American citizens to make their own firearms, that he seemed aghast that Wilson had“personally moved beyond plastic to machine-grade metal, funding his legal fight by selling thousands of these– a milling machine capable of making unmarked metal AR-15s and handguns– A.K.A., ghost guns.”
Meanwhile, over at MRCTV, Caleb Tolin touted last year’s federal settlement that allowed Wilson to again post his gun designs, and Brittany Hughes gushed that Wilson would be selling his 3D-printed gun designs online “in defiance of a court order,” claiming that the debate over 3D guns that Wilson is at the center of has been “largely misconstrued.”
But what you won’t read on any MRC website: Wilson’s brush with the law … of the underage sex kind.
Earlier this month, the 31-year-old Wilson pleaded guilty in a case in which he was accused of paying to have sex with an underage girl, whom he found on a website called SugarDaddyMeet. He was arrested in Taiwan after allegedly fleeing the country to avoid prosecution. Wilson ultimately pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of injury to a child; he will avoid prison time, but he must register as a sex offender and, ironically, cannot own a firearm during the seven years of his probation.
Don’t expect the MRC to hold itself to the standards it demands others follow — it never has before.