We spend so much energy watching the propaganda spewed by Fox News that we don't always notice it coming from places like CNN, which appear mainstream only by comparison to Fox, and really are not mainstream at all. Here is a good example:
In the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting tragedy, it seems the entire world is focused on the USA's lax gun laws. You can read headlines from international papers like, "Massacre Sparks Foreign Criticism of US Gun Culture" (from a Reuters article picked up by many foreign papers, including the Malaysia Star). The Australian talks about the "desensitizing standards of routine American gun violence." Even Forbes concedes, "US Gun Laws Criticized Abroad."
Here is how the same event looks through CNN's eyes:
CNN says:
Shootings Highlight "Global Epidemic".
CNN does not see this as a uniquely American phenomenon, but evidence of a global epidemic, and therefore unrelated to lax US gun laws.
The article contains 25 short paragraphs, and manages to quote Bush and the NRA near the top. Also near the top is a summary bullet reinforcing the point that this is a "global epidemic." But I defy anyone to find text in the article that supports the headline.
Here is a candidate:
According to an IANSA report published in 2006, gun-related incidents result in 300,000 fatalities and one million injuries worldwide every year.
Too bad the author tacked on this sentence:
Many of those guns come from the U.S.
There is a brief discussion near the end of the article about a gunman in Australia who killed 35 people. Unfortunately, that event was 11 years ago, described this way in the article:
"We had a terrible incident at Port Arthur, but it is the case that 11 years ago we took action to limit the availability of guns and we showed a national resolve that the gun culture that is such a negative in the United States would never become a negative in our country," he said.
The article ends with this quote from K. Subrahmanyam, a former member of India's National Security Council. International Epidemic? He says:
"It's not a question of an Indian professor getting killed in the firing. This is related to the American gun laws," he said.