I didn't mean to imply that everyone living in the greater Washington DC area was marching in lockstep to the Washington Post's tune, but at the same time they can influence a lot of people - including legislators.
I didn't either, actually, which only goes to show the power of words, even with unintended connotations and implications. Now look at what biased professional writers with an agenda, such as many who work for the Washington Post, deliberately do with words.
I'm sure the same thing is going on in other large urban cities, and clearly I don't see how anyone could call this balanced reporting. Editorials are one thing, but these are what they call "news articles."
I don't wish to throw a blanket insult on all reporters, but the goal for many of them is unabashedly to change the world or improve humanity's state of affairs (as they see fit)--this is why they got into journalism, not the excitement of covering events or the satisfaction of providing accurate, unbiased information to the public. When you give people too much power, they will abuse it, and in this case it takes the form of shaping the views of the public through a biased, unbalanced, and just plain deceptive campaign of misinformation (much like politics)--often combined with a subtle but cumulatively effective use of words.
I don't know what we can do about it, but at the same time it's something we should be aware of. I suspect if the founding fathers had know'n what was down the road they would have...
The founding fathers knew and explicitly warned about a great many mortal dangers to liberty, such as national debt, for example. They also knew that they only had the citizens of the country to rely upon to uphold and fight for the principles that they had set forth. It is up to us to make sure that we and our children are not so ignorant as to be fooled by those who aim to take away our rights and freedom.
So besides being aware, what can we do? Aside from what we're doing now to preserve our 2nd Amendment rights, I don't know, but the way things have been going, eventually we'll have to come up with real leaders and vote for them instead of the political cronies and puppets that the two established parties force on us. Unfortunately, things will probably have to get pretty desperate before anything like that would ever happen.
I mean, they still need people, but control their minds through the dark side of the Force or something similar to the One Ring. 