An article in today's Chicago Tribune shows just how deeply gun-control bias has soaked into the mindset of the average beat reporter. Start with the article's title: "Guns take 5 lives over weekend." Now you would think that guns, being inanimate objects, would lack the capacity to take lives without a little help. But thanks to the exculpatory powers of the passive voice, this embarrassment can be easily worked around.
Consider an example from the story: "[The victim] was sitting in a car with two other men about 1:50 a.m. in the 3400 block of West 12th Place when a second car pulled up and shots were fired. . ." Shots were fired. You know, by a gun. To be fair, the reporter did manage slip an instance of the active voice into a later account in the same story (". . . one of the robbers took [the victim] into a gangway and shot him several times . . ."). But othewise, the reporter assiduously avoided this straightforward, active-voice style when it came to firearms. In a city that has banned all handgun possession since 1982, you have to wonder about this tendency--whether conscious or unconscious--to keep blaming guns.
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