US National Rifle Association threatens New York Times in provocative video ad

Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association (NRA) Wayne LaPierre walks on stage prior to his remarks during the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center on February 24, 2017 in National Harbor, Maryland. (Photo by AFP)

Politically influential pro-gun lobby in the US, the National Rifle Association (NRA), has waged a harshly-worded attack on a widely-published newspaper in the country through a video advertisement that suggests violent take-out of the daily.

Official NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch, who is also a prominent conservative media personality, attacked the New York Times in the video, referring to it as an “untrustworthy, dishonest rag” and saying it is “coming for” the daily, which commonly implies a threatening gesture to remove or neutralize a subject.

Reacting to assertions that the ad amounted to a call to arms and a threat against the safety of the newspaper’s reporters, Loesch insisted that anyone who interpreted the video that way was projecting “their violent fantasies on to others,” the UK-based Guardian reported Saturday.

Pressed about her remarks in the video ad that the NRA was “coming for” the Times, and how it could be interpreted as anything other than a threat, Loesch further claimed that it was a call to action “in the battlefield of ideas,” as cited by the daily.

According to the report, Loesch rose to prominence through a newspaper column about motherhood and by hosting a right-wing “alternative” radio show. She then appeared on an NRA recruitment video, released in June, in which she argued that people should join the pro-firearms group to defend the country against liberals.

In the video ad against the New York Times, published to the gun lobby’s Twitter account on Friday night, Loesch mocked the liberal daily for making a “pretentious” claim that it provided accurate, fact-based journalism.

Loesch also sued in 2012 the parent company of the ultra-right news website Breitbart, where she worked as a writer and editor.

Loesch claimed at the time that she was forced to terminate her contract due to an “increasingly hostile” work environment. Current White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was then helping to lead the website.

“The external success of Loesch and Breitbart.com masked the emerging internal difficulties the new company had with managing the media ‘empire’,” the lawsuit claimed. “For reasons that may just as easily be attributed to basic ideological conflicts, the working environment for Loesch became increasingly hostile.”

Loesch was seeking at least $75,000 in damages, but the cased ended up being dismissed in June 2013.