Prez Says Yes to Gun Control; Press Hangs onto Fiscal Cliff

Jim Stubenrauch is a CHMP senior fellow and a co-founder of the program in Narrative Writing for Health Care Professionals. Follow him on Twitter: @jimstuben.

At a press conference on Wednesday afternoon, five days after the mass murder in the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, President Obama announced the formation of a task force on gun control to be headed by Vice President Biden—and then for the next 22 minutes of a half-hour Q & A, he took questions from a roomful of White House correspondents—the crème de la crème of the Washington press corps—about the so-called fiscal cliff. (Here’s a video and here’s the official transcript.)

At the precise instant that the POTUS stood up before the world and spent some precious political capital in declaring that, at long last, some serious effort would be made to end decades of paralysis on gun control and that substantive changes might soon help prevent acts like Adam Lanza’s slaughter of defenseless schoolchildren and teachers, the AP’s chief White House correspondent, Ben Feller, and the Wall Street Journal’s Carol Lee, among others, took the opportunity to turn away from discussion of this critical issue and return to the topic that had so preoccupied the news media before last week’s mass murder. The questions that followed amounted to an obsessively detailed but redundant parsing of the stalled budget negotiations. Half of that conversation is already old news.

I understand that this kind of thing happens all the time at presidential pressers, but in this particular instance I found the business-as-usual approach to the business of Washington insufferable and inappropriate. What this says to me—and I’m not the only one criticizing the press for this—is that the professionals in the room didn’t necessarily see the president’s statement as anything out of the ordinary; to them it was nothing more than the expected response to yet another routine tragedy that, in the long run, won’t make any difference in how guns are manufactured and sold, used and misused, or how—all too often in our country—innocent people die. The gun violence task force and the prospect of bipartisan support for gun control legislation are apparently of less moment than the same old same old about tax hikes and entitlement cuts. (And let’s leave aside the question of whether it’s accurate to say that we’re experiencing a “fiscal crisis” or whether what we’re hearing is anything more than the cynical maneuvering of antigovernment ideologues on behalf of the richest of the rich.)

Perhaps I found this incident particularly galling because of the way television and radio had been for the previous five days not only reporting on the shootings but dramatizing the nation’s collective response to the event.