Month: October 2021

 This is a requested re-posting of a post originally written July 22, 2020. ]

I wrote yesterday about the leftward spin of mainstream news. My example was an article in the Atlantic that attempted to explain the author’s belief that the police should be abolished by citing what turned out to be a fictitious incident from her past.

Today I read of an article in The New Yorker, another anti-police piece, that makes a startling claim. In the article, author Jill Lepore, who is a professor of American history at Harvard, makes this claim:

“One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards, about as many people as the number of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles.” – Jill Lapore, July 13, 2020

Two-thirds? That’s an alarming statistic, if true.

The study she mentions was conducted by Harvard doctoral student Justin Feldman in 2016. A Harvard write-up about the study contained this sentence:

“Sixty-four percent of the estimated 683,033 injuries logged between 2001-2014 among persons age 15-34 resulted from an officer hitting a civilian.” – Harvard News, 2016

What the news story didn’t make clear is that the 683,033 injuries referred specifically to injuries caused by law enforcement and/or private security. That isn’t the total of all emergency room visits by this demographic, merely the total of all emergency room visits by young people that resulted from encounters with police or private security personnel over a 14 year period.

What the study found was that about two-thirds of all police and/or security related emergency room visits made by young people were the result of the patient being struck, as opposed to, for example, tasered, pepper-sprayed, shot, etc.

The actual percentage of ALL emergency room visits by people in the 15-34 age range that result from an officer or private security person striking the victim? It’s estimated to be about 0.2%.

In other words, the New Yorker article got it wrong by more than a factor of 100.

And, coincidentally, the mistake once again favors the left’s narrative.

When the overwhelming majority of journalists, professors, etc., live in progressive bubbles, it’s hardly surprising that even their innocent mistakes all tilt one way. All the more reason to encourage a healthy debate.

And the standard closing: mainstream media makes you less well informed. Read broadly, and with skepticism. And just turn off the television.

[ This is a requested re-posting of a post originally written July 21, 2020. ]

The so-called “Coriolis effect” is a result of the rotation of our planet. The Earth is bigger around at the equator than it is closer to the poles, and yet every point on the Earth still has to go all the way around the planet every single day, so the points nearer the equator have to move faster than the points nearer the poles in order to cover their longer distance in the same 24 hours.

This is what causes hurricanes to rotate in a counter-clockwise direction in the northern hemisphere. Some people think that this applies to water going down a sink drain as well, but that’s a myth. The Coriolis effect is insignificant over small distances, and has no detectable effect on the water in your sink. That water will spiral to the left or to the right depending, not on the rotation of the planet, but rather on how the water is moving when you pull the plug, irregularities in the sink, etc.

But if you want to see something that DOES reliably spin to the left, take a look at The Atlantic. I linked to an article last week about a story the magazine ran entitled “How I Became a Police Abolitionist,” in which the author claims that her conversion to anti-police activism began when she, as a child, witnessed the shooting of another child by a police officer — a shooting for which there was, she claimed, no consequence.

A writer at The Federalist, a conservative news source, attempted to verify the facts of the account related in The Atlantic but was unable to do so. Under pressure from skeptics, The Atlantic has now acknowledged that the account is inaccurate, and has revised the story accordingly.

In fact, the shooting (which occurred in 2004) did not involve a police officer, but rather a uniformed security guard hired by a St. Louis recreation center. The young man who was shot (in the arm) was not a child: he was the 18 year old cousin of the security guard, who was himself only 23. The shooting was reportedly the result of an argument between the young men, and police filed charges against the shooter within hours of the shooting.

The Atlantic has revised the online version of the story, which now seems to make a poor argument for abolishing the police.

Mistakes are inevitable. It’s telling, however, that the mainstream media’s mistakes overwhelmingly spin to the left. Whether we’re talking about a recreation center shooting in 2004 or a non-existent Russian conspiracy spanning years of the Trump administration, the first version almost inevitably makes the right look bad. Corrections, if any are forthcoming, tend to be tucked away and receive much less coverage.

Thus, with the mainstream media’s complicity, the narrative marches onward.