As Twitchy reported Tuesday, Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler decided to call out Attorney General Bill Barr on his claim that 90 percent of black homicides are committed by other blacks. What was incorrect about it? Nothing, actually, but Kessler felt there was “important missing context” in Barr not mentioning that 84 percent of white murder victims are killed by whites.
Now the New York Times is taking the exact same tact as Kessler in its fact-check of Barr’s statement: “The vast majority of [Blacks], around 90 percent, are killed by other Blacks, mainly by gunfire.”
Attorney General William P. Barr, in a contentious congressional hearing on Tuesday, defended President Trump and the Justice Department on a variety of matters. Here is a fact-check. https://t.co/NiXBBU6H2V
— NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) July 30, 2020
In fact-checking Barr, the Times only managed to prove how accurate he was in his statement:
This is misleading. Mr. Barr cited this statistic to argue that “the threat to Black lives posed by crime on the streets is massively greater than any threat posed by police misconduct.”
He is correct that about 88.9 percent of Black murder victims were killed by Black perpetrators in 2018. But left unsaid was the fact that murder victims and their perpetrators are overwhelmingly of the same race or ethnicity: 80.7 percent of white murder victims were killed by white perpetrators, and 68.4 percent of Latino murder victims by other Latinos.
Barr says around 90 percent of black homicides are committed by blacks … the actual number is 88.9 percent … and that deserves a “fact-check.”
NYT "fact checking" — this thing that's totally true is actually misleading because, oh look, here's an unrelated fact! pic.twitter.com/HcfsB2vR3J
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) July 30, 2020
Facts are racist ™
— Pradheep J. Shanker (@Neoavatara) July 30, 2020
— After Dork (@Dork_After) July 30, 2020
The NYT fact check basically should lead readers to the conclusion that violent crime is on average more deadly for people of every group than policing is.
— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) July 30, 2020
Yup. Good point.
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) July 30, 2020
I guess the average IQ of NYT has gone down substantially, since they are acting like their readers are exceptionally dumb.
— SPAC King (@KingofSPAC) July 30, 2020
I had an English teacher in school that would have scratched out that entire second paragraph and told me to start over. pic.twitter.com/7Y1NRAhK58
— Conservative Candor (@RepublicanGold) July 30, 2020
Oh, and the Times also has a problem with Barr saying that “hundreds of rioters have laid siege to the federal courthouse” in Portland every night for the past two months. Is that not true? Well, yes, it’s true, but it’s “exaggerated.”
This is exaggerated. While some protesters in Portland have been violent, many others have been peaceful and have included high school students, military veterans, off-duty lawyers and lines of women who call themselves the “Wall of Moms.”
Oh, so the protests are mostly peaceful, but Barr only focused on the rioters, as an attorney general would do. It’s misleading because he didn’t mention the “Wall of Moms,” who — fact-check — are all moms and haven’t contributed at all to the violence.
What a joke.
Related:
‘Worst fact check I’ve ever seen’: WaPo’s Glenn Kessler gives the important missing context to AG Barr’s comment on black-on-black homicide https://t.co/lnUJPNFSp5
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) July 28, 2020
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