African-American Deaths Literally Off the Chart
Black Lives don’t matter? New York Times leaves African-Americans off of mortality chart.
The New York Times (11/2/15) made a chart to show that while death rates for middle-aged people in most developed countries are falling, the rate is rising for middle-aged whites in the United States—a result of increasing drug and alcohol overdoses, alcohol-induced liver damage and suicides (PNAS, 10/29/15). The Times chart included mortality for middle-aged US Latinos, whose death rate is also falling. But it didn’t include middle-aged African-Americans, the third largest US ethnic group—presumably because although their death rate is falling as well, it’s still so far above that of their white counterparts (582 vs. 415 per 100,000) that it would have required a bigger chart.
The news that middle-aged whites in the US are dying more when most groups are dying less is shocking—but it’s complicated by the reality that they now die 71 percent as often as their black peers, as opposed to 56 percent as often, as they did 14 years ago. It would have been worth making a bigger chart to make that point.
How Many Protesters Gunned Down? You Do the Math
Palestinians killed by Israelis are missing from a Washington Post headline.
Israeli victims got the headline (“Palestinians Kill 3 Israelis as Violence Mounts in ‘Day of Rage’”) and the lead (“Three Israelis were killed and nearly two dozen injured in a series of Palestinian attacks Tuesday….”) of a Washington Post story (10/13/15) by William Booth and Ruth Eglash. Several paragraphs down, the story acknowledged that not all the deaths were on the Israeli side:
Eight Israelis have been slain and dozens have been wounded in the last couple of weeks, while at least 28 Palestinians have been killed by Israelis. According to Israeli authorities, a dozen of the slain Palestinians were attackers; the rest died in clashes with Israeli forces.
Note the primary placement of the smaller number of Israeli deaths, the lack of a parallel estimate for Palestinian injuries, and the specificity of the number of Palestinians whose deaths could be justified (according to Israeli official claims) compared to the hidden-in-a-word-problem vagueness of the largest category of deaths: the 16 or more Palestinians killed in “clashes,” meaning for the most part protesters throwing rocks gunned down by Israeli soldiers armed with submachine guns.
From Hoax to Fox to Trump to NBC
Donald Trump offers Matt Lauer a statistic derived from a hoax website.
Fox News’ Sean Hannity (10/19/15) told Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush that “the president said he’s going to bring in 250,000 refugees into this country.” The next day, Hannity (10/20/15) gave the same statistic to candidate Donald Trump: “This president has committed to nearly 250,000 coming to America. That tells me we’re—we have a pre-9/11 mindset again.”
What was Hannity’s source for this remarkable claim? PolitiFact (10/26/15) could find only one possible source: the joke website Real News Right Now, which featured that story in September, along with reports like “Vatican City Conducts ‘Successful’ Nuclear Test” and “Joe the Plumber Caught Trying to Enter North Korea.”
The same day PolitiFact pointed out that Hannity’s claim derived from a hoax website, Trump offered it to NBC’s Matt Lauer at a televised town hall (10/26/15; Media Matters, 10/27/15) as a reason to be fearful of immigrants: “We have a president that said 3,000, then it was 5,000, then it was 10,000—now he wants to bring in 250,000 people, who nobody even knows who they are…. This could be the greatest Trojan horse of all time.” Lauer raised no questions about Trump’s remarkable made-up statistic.
Sanders: ‘Let Me Say Something About Media’; Media: ‘No’
One of the most talked-about moments in the October 12 Democratic presidential debate came when Sen. Bernie Sanders agreed with Hillary Clinton that focus on her emails was a distraction.
But as Lee Fang at the Intercept (10/14/15) pointed out, many TV reports cut out the crucial context of this exchange, when Sanders explained:
Anderson…let me say something about the media, as well. I go around the country, talk to a whole lot of people. Middle class in this country is collapsing. We have 27 million people living in poverty. We have massive wealth and income inequality. Our trade policies have cost us millions of decent jobs. The American people want to know whether we’re going to have a democracy or an oligarchy as a result of Citizens United. Enough of the emails….
In other words, media cut out the part where Sanders made clear he wasn’t just criticizing Republicans, he was also criticizing media that prioritize sensationalism over basic economic realities. But as the pathfinding media critic George Seldes put it, “The most sacred cow of the press is the press itself.”
Don’t Know Much About Recent History
The United States invades Iraq–in 2003, not 2004, as Donald Trump seems to remember.
“I didn’t want to go into Iraq in 2004 and we went there,” Donald Trump told Joe Scarborough (MSNBC, 8/10/15). “In 2004, I was totally against going in,” he said to CNN’s Anderson Cooper (7/22/15). “I was against the war from the very beginning, all the way back in 2004,” Trump wrote in an op-ed for USA Today (9/8/15). As the Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone (9/14/15) pointed out, neither Scarborough, Cooper nor the editors at USA Today pointed out the obvious: that the invasion of Iraq happened in 2003, and that by 2004 coming out against the Iraq War was about as brave as taking a stand in favor of flossing.
