CyberAlert Extra
ABC's Charlie Gibson pressed President Bill Clinton from the left on gun control this morning.
ABC's Good Morning America broadcast live from the White House this
morning, presenting a two hour special titled "Kids & Guns: Is
There a Solution?" The show dropped many ad breaks to allow more time
with the Clintons. For 45 uninterrupted minutes from about 7:30am to
8:15am ET Bill and Hillary Clinton, with Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer
hosting, talked in the Roosevelt Room with a group of high school
students.
Earlier, for most
of the 7am half hour, Gibson interviewed Clinton in the Cabinet Room and
approached the gun issue from the left, demanding to know why Clinton has
not done more to regulate guns. Gibson's questions clearly angered
Clinton who became indignant that anyone would question his commitment.
Gibson relayed how a friend was disappointed about how "the President
had a chance to roar on gun control and he meowed," how despite
public support for more gun laws "we're not fighting about
regulation of guns" and if we don't fight for that, Gibson
lamented, "hasn't the NRA basically framed the debate at that
point?"
Now to the details
of this portion of the interview, which MRC Webmaster Sean Henry is
posting on the MRC home page in RealPlayer format. To view it, just go to:
http://www.mrc.org
When videos are replaced on our home page they
remain viewable at: http://www.mediaresearch.org/news/biasvideo.html
After Clinton
defended the effectiveness of the additional gun rules passed by the
Senate, Gibson argued as transcribed by MRC analyst Jessica Anderson:
"But when you went to Littleton, a friend of
yours, who supports you on gun control, said to me in the last 48 hours,
the President, because as he said Littleton has seared the national
conscience, the President had a chance to roar on gun control and he
meowed, and that was a friend of yours. There are very basic measures that
could be taken that people agree on. We register every automobile in
America. We don't register guns. That's a step that would make a
difference."
A seething Clinton
told Gibson to "join the real world here" as the votes are not
in Congress for tougher rules given the Senate only passed the new gun
show bill by the vote of the Vice President. Clinton boasted about how
he's "the first President who ever took on the NRA" and when
he got Congress to pass the Brady Bill in 1994 "we lost between 12
and 20 members of the House of Representatives because they were targeted
by the NRA for standing up for the lives of our children."
An indignant
Clinton complained: "Whoever you talk about that you don't want to
out here, to ignore the fact that my administration and my party took on
this issue when no one else would, and paid a huge price for it and lost
control of the House of Representatives in all probability because of it,
and to pretend that this is an easy thing now because of Littleton is
wrong."
Gibson pushed
again from the left: "But let me come back to you on that, the polls,
I agree on that, the polls have shown that this country would accept
registration of firearms and yet we don't do that and we're not
fighting about regulation of guns. We regulate every other consumer
product out there."
Clinton replied: "The reason is this
Congress came to power after the 1994 elections because in critical races
the people who voted for more modest things like the Brady Bill, which the
polls showed the voters support, got beat."
Gibson bemoaned: "But hasn't the NRA won
the debate at that point? Once we say it's politically impossible, we
can't do it, we won't propose it, hasn't the NRA basically framed
the debate at that point?"
Of course, an
impartial journalist wouldn't care which side won the debate and if he
did have a viewpoint, which there's nothing wrong with having, a
professional journalist would keep his personal views to himself. --
Brent Baker
3
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