By Lee Williams
SAF Investigative Journalism Project
Special to Liberty Park Press
Chip Brownlee’s recent story about Emergency Risk Protection Orders, known as ERPOs, which was published online by the Trace is actually well written. It’s completely wrong and chock-full of anti-gun propaganda, but it is well written.
Brownlee’s story is a great example of how the Trace operates and why its claim to be “the only newsroom dedicated to reporting on gun violence” is so deeply flawed.
To be clear, the Trace is paid to produce anti-gun propaganda. They’re propagandists not journalists, and as we’ll show, they’ve certainly never had a real newsroom.
The Trace is funded by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. It’s always cashed Bloomberg’s checks and it always will, but there’s a much bigger issue.
John Feinblatt is president of both the Trace and the largest anti-gun organization in the country—Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety. Everytown calls itself “the largest gun violence prevention organization in America.”
To say that’s a conflict of interest is obvious. After all, you’ve got the Trace, which claims to be “the only newsroom dedicated to reporting on gun violence” overseen and paid for by “the largest gun violence prevention organization in America.”
As a result, the Trace’s stories will always be propaganda rather than journalism. That’s what they’re paid for by the country’s largest anti-gun organization, which claims to be comprised of “more than 11 million mayors, teachers, survivors, gun owners, students, and everyday Americans.”
Feinblatt even admitted he came up with the idea of the Trace after Everytown had problems obtaining access to government data. After discussing his idea with Bloomberg, the Trace was launched in 2015, and Everytown was its largest donor.
The money is still flowing. According to the Trace’s 2024 IRS for 990, the Editor-in-Chief was paid more than $280,000. A staff writer made more than $170,000.
Despite the high pay, if you look at the editorial content of their stories, the Trace certainly has never produced any real journalism. Another factor explains this very well.
The Trace claims to be a newsroom. I’ve worked in four newsrooms. The staffing was always the same: There were always far more reporters than editors. When I became an editor, I supervised six reporters. That’s why.
The Trace is the exact opposite. According to its own data, the Trace has twice as many editors than it does reporters: 14 editors but only seven reporters.
The reason for this irregularity is simple: the Trace is far more concerned with its anti-gun mission than what its staffers may have actually found. In other words, the Trace pays more attention to how something is sold to its readers, rather than what is actually sold. It’s propaganda, after all, so they need more propagandists than they do reporters.
Mr. Brownlee’s recent story is a great example. It fits a pattern. It begins with a horrible shooting, and then the first quote is always given to a staunch anti-gunner.
“We’re very concerned about the trajectory of anti-ERPO laws, both in the rise in the number of states passing these laws and the escalations within the laws themselves,” said Emily Walsh, a law and policy adviser at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.
Clearly, anyone working at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions is going to have an anti-gun opinion, right? The entire group hopes to ban privately owned firearms.
Mr. Brownlee, or perhaps the more than a dozen members of the Trace’s editorial team, also castigates all pro-gun sources mentioned in the story. In this case it was Kyle Rittenhouse, who the author noted testified last year against ERPO legislation.
“Rittenhouse — wearing a pin in the shape of an assault-style rifle on his lapel — portrayed ERPOs as a means to ‘weaponize’ false accusations. In 2020, during racial justice protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, he shot three people, killing two. A jury acquitted him of homicide, but he still faces lawsuits for negligence and wrongful death brought by the man he wounded and the family of 26-year-old Anthony Huber, one of the two men Rittenhouse killed,” Brownlee wrote.
The Trace has never published anything this negative about any anti-gun source—not once.
Takeaways
At its base level, the Trace is just like its parent organization, Everytown for Gun Safety. It’s just another anti-gun group. That’s all it will ever be.
Most gun owners have known this since the day the Trace was founded 11 years ago. That’s why no one who knows the difference between an AR and an AK pays too much attention to what it publishes.
Besides, any point the Trace makes in its stories should be taken about as seriously as its mailing address, which is actually just a UPS store in Brooklyn. I’m sure that was done for security and not economic reasons, right?
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