[See UPDATE below.]
On the NBC News last night, I heard the story of a false racially-motivated bullying report, which reminded me of the Tawana Brawley rape hoax publicized in 1987 by Al Sharpton. I’m not posting this to argue that these kinds of allegations are often false. I don’t think they are, but they do occur and shouldn’t be accepted at face value without verification. Rather, I wanted to briefly note how the New York Times, by changing its headlines after the hoax was revealed, also showed its ideological bias, which, as I’ve argued, is getting not only woker and woker, but woke to the extent that the biases conflate the paper’s journalism with ideology. While the paper retains its liberal slant, I no longer think of it as a source that even tries to strive for objectivity.
Now I must add that the photos below were sent to me by a reader, and I haven’t been able to verify it thoroughly yet, though it appears in an article by conservative Rod Dreher, who includes one tweet. (The second headline is accurate.) For the moment I’ll take it as genuine, and will correct this later if this proves to be “fake news.” (Given the way that the NYT is going, though, I doubt it).
The backstory is that Amari Allen. a 12-year-old girl at a Immanuel Christian School in Springfield, Virginia claimed that three white boys had held her down and cut off her dreadlocks. After police questioning, her story fell apart, the girl admitted she made up the incident (she must have cut off her own dreadlocks), and the school and the girl’s parents apologized. (By the way, Mike Pence’s wife teaches at that school, and it’s also a school that, according to the NYT, “says that it does not accept gay students and that it requires employees to affirm that marriage should be between one man and one woman.”)
Well, those school policies are ridiculous, in line with the poison of conservative Christianity. And I feel sorry for Amari Allen, who must have faked the incident to gain attention. She clearly requires some kind of counseling or help.
But there’s no excuse for what the New York Times did when it found out that the story was a hoax. It apparently changed the headline from the original one that emphasized white-on-black bullying, to a race-neutral one (the new headline is also below):
Granted, the revised story, read by clicking on screenshot below, does describe race in its first sentence: “It was a story bound to unleash a storm of news coverage: A black 12-year-old girl reported that three white boys had pinned her down in a school playground and cut off her dreadlocks.”
Yes, and the reason it was bound to unleash a storm of news coverage is because it looked like a hate crime. And the Times, of course, emphasized that in its headline. But if the alteration above is true, then someone at the paper made a conscious decision to de-emphasize race when the black girl’s story was found to be a hoax. “Black” and “white” have been omitted.
The only justification for this I can see is that the paper was trying to stir up outrage by reporting this as a racial hate crime. When the “crime” was found to be bogus, all of a sudden race disappeared. But if race was relevant to the first headline—and you can make the case that it was—it’s also relevant to the retraction, because, as the Times admits, race was the reason that the story got so much play in the first place.
The direction the paper is going in upsets me a great deal. The Times has always been my news source, and, while having a reliably liberal slant in its opinions, kept the news separate from editorializing. That has vanished: now the news, as you can see above, is a vehicle for editorializing. I’m pretty sure this is a conscious decision by its new publisher, A. G. Sulzberger.
Here’s the new story:
h/t: cesar
UPDATE
by Greg Mayer
The original tweet mentioned in the OP didn’t get what the Times did quite right. There are two stories: the original report, and the recantation. The tweet shows the headline of the two different stories. This is not a case of a changed headline, but rather that in the second story the headline writer (who is not the reporter–as noted in the OP, race was front and center in the lede of the recantation story) did not use racial terms. Comments on the infection of the Times‘ news operation by its editorial board (i.e. the opinion pages) apply to this choice of wording. (I would also note that the original report article and the recantation article are by different reporters.)
Although the tweet does not demonstrate a change in the headline, there was indeed a change in the headline of the original story– I noticed it yesterday. Here’s the actual changed headline:
The Times has done two things here. First it changed the headline of an already posted story. This is not that unusual in the age of continual story updates in the digital age. The choice to take race out of it is subject to the critique of the Times Jerry made. What is much more unusual is the second change made– the Times negates the story not just in the headline, but in an update preceding the original article:
In my experience, the Times hasn’t done this before (or so rarely I’ve never noticed). They do follow up articles, they add corrections at the bottom of the article, but they don’t change already published articles– to do so would be a falsification of history, and correctly, they don’t do such Orwellian re-writing. In this case they have not changed the text of the original article– we can still read the original story as put out by the Times— but they have changed the headline so as to make it clear that the original story is wrong.
So what did the Times do? The headline of the new story, and the altered headline of the original story, do downplay race. But it also in effect “canceled” the original story, something it, at least in general, does not do. It may have done so because it realized how bad it made the Times look, but perhaps also because of how bad it, incorrectly, made the school and its white students look. Sounds like a research project for the Columbia School of Journalism.
I originally thought that the Times “wokeness” was just a series of bad hires for the opinion pages, but such bad hires have gone both ways– who, other than his close friends and family, could care at all what Ross Douthat thinks about anything? Jerry sounded the warning early, and, sadly, it is now clear that he was right, and that “wokeness” has infected much of the paper’s news coverage.
I was disappointed in NBC news for running the story one day and then coming back to say it was a hoax later. Too quick to pull the trigger and too little checking. It sounded strange in the beginning.
Yes a rush to get the best clickable headline has made fact checking an afterthought & therefore ruins the integrity of stories which just feeds the whole “fake news” bias.
And it just seemed like NBC was saying, Oh well, it was a Hoax, we reported it as real, so what. No wrong doing on our part.
I think it must be hard for a news outlet to wait for corroboration in cases like this. When does corroboration occur? When the kids who perpetrated the alleged crime admit to it? By that time it is no longer worth reporting. As long as NBC reports the incident when it happens and treats it as a claim, and not a conviction, they are doing the best they can. I was happy that they spent air time the next day telling us that the girl had recanted her story.
“I’m not posting this to argue that these kinds of allegations are often false.”
According to sleuthing by Andy Ngo and others, such allegations are indeed often false.
E.g. list here
Yes, Andy Ngo, a model of impartiality.
Do you dispute the cases he cited?
You mean the stories he cited from over three years? Without placing them in context with cases of actual racism?
Well, as a matter of fact I do dispute some of them, yes. I’ve had a cursory look through that list, clicking on a few of the stories, and already I notice instances where the story is not as it’s claimed to be. The claim that they are all ‘hoaxes’ is simply untrue, for instance:
https://www.kxly.com/news/former-wsu-student-who-threatened-to-bomb-campus-pleads-guilty/716877263
This was one of a number of stories in Coel’s link that simply did not fit the description of ‘hoax’. Not unless you simply fill in blanks for yourself and make a lot of completely baseless assumptions. Yet it’s labeled along with everything else as a ‘race/hate hoax’.
Other links in the thread didn’t work, and some of the stories were about people who simply didn’t continue with a court case and dropped allegations. No evidence that there was a hoax either way.
Of course, there were plenty of instances of genuine false allegations(if you see what I mean) of bigotry – but I’d kind of expect that given the thread gathers stories from across a country of 320m+ people, and is drawn from over three years of newspaper reports, news websites, twitter feeds and simple Facebook entries.
He’s got a well known bias and it doesn’t surprise me that some of these are more complicated than he let’s on.
Three years is not really a long time but in this case it is relevant as recently we’ve seen the ramping up of hate crimes and accelerated social decay. For reasons.
His context IS badly skewed as the hoaxes (and related frauds) he cited are rare compared to real crimes. But therein lies the problem – they get a disproportionate amount of press.
Those who perpetuate these hoaxes are usually confused, frightened young people looking for attention or diversion from some other fault, but they have a pernicious effect on the public’s perception of hate crimes. Ngo was trying, in his biased and not-in-context way, to amplify real hoaxes precisely because it fits his own right wing innocence project. But they were (for the most part) real hoaxes.
” But therein lies the problem – they get a disproportionate amount of press.”
Yes. They are incredibly damaging. But listing them in the way he does doesn’t help, as can be seen elsewhere in this thread. It causes people’s estimates of the likelihood of fraudulent claims to absolutely skyrocket.
Some of the genuine examples in the list are incredibly depressing, and infuriating; the kind of grifter who follows the rules of identity politics to the letter and so knows exactly which buttons to press in the quest for outrage.
This is a good example of why biased news reporting is so troubling. It seems like left leaning outlets avoid reporting hoaxes, as they do not fit the desired narrative. And right leaning sources are likely to overemphasize them.
That leaves anyone who just wants the facts in a position of having to check all the sources ourselves, to the extent that doing so is possible. So it is difficult to get an honest accounting of what percentage of these incidents are faked.
Also the reasoning behind the fakes can be pretty diverse. Some seem to be about actually promoting a political narrative or receiving the social status that victims do these days.
Sometimes it is just someone who invents such a story in order to avoid getting in trouble for some minor thing, and the story and it’s effects grow out of control.
But we do live in a political climate where a lot of people truly believe that there are Klan members and Nazis everywhere, wielding great power from the shadows. as with any commodity, when hate crimes are in high demand but scarce, they must be manufactured or fabricated.
The Jose Andres Tecuatl case discussed above ought to be considered a hate hoax, as the student held left wing beliefs, but made the threats under the guise of a Nazi, using swastikas.
I found this site- http://www.fakehatecrimes.org/
I have not checked out only a handful of the hundreds listed, so I don’t endorse either the politics of the publishers or the accuracy of their data. But there is enough there to make one believe that this is a troubling trend.
I looked at fakehatecrimes.org. A professor who has been favourably referenced elsewhere in this comment section had recommended the website as a source of of over 300 instances of fake hate crimes.
But it’s nothing of the sort – it’s just a jumble of links to stories of genuine hoaxes, some of which are repeated twice on just the first page of links, mixed with a whole bunch of tangentially connected stuff. One of the links is to some random person’s twitter feed, where they ‘ask questions’ of David Lammy, a British MP, as you know. Two of the links are for interviews with the aforementioned professor. And this is just from the first thirty links to ‘fake hate crimes’. Not good.
“The Jose Andres Tecuatl case discussed above ought to be considered a hate hoax, as the student held left wing beliefs, but made the threats under the guise of a Nazi, using swastikas.”
Again, this is simply not true. The police report was that his motivations were unknown, and the swastika was simply one of numerous things he wrote or carved. As for explicitly left-wing beliefs – which were those?
This is more motivated reasoning. You’ll read into it what you want to.
“It seems like left leaning outlets avoid reporting hoaxes, as they do not fit the desired narrative. And right leaning sources are likely to overemphasize them.”
There we can agree.
He seems pretty fair and impartial to me. Of course some on the “antifa” far-left try to demonise him, because he reports on their activities and they don’t like that.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/andy-ngo-who-became-a-right-wing-star-leaves-quillette-after-incriminating-video-appears
The claim that he’s impartial is…not convincing.
The antifa left have jumped on that video, yes, but it’s far from “incriminating”. All it really shows is Ngo looking at his phone while some “Patriot Prayer” protestors are milling around. See here for an analysis: “… there is a vast chasm between what the video actually shows versus what it is alleged to show.”
I’ve watched the video myself. Not soon after it came out he ‘coincidentally’ ‘left’ Quillette.
It’s clear – he was stood right next to armed far-right members of Patriot Prayer as they spoke about pepper spraying their opponents and mentioned their weapons. I’m not particularly interested in the rationalisations that a right-wing libertarian magazine has managed to cook up in his defense.
“It’s clear – he was stood right next to armed far-right members of Patriot Prayer as they spoke about pepper spraying their opponents and mentioned their weapons.”
That’s is, that’s the charge sheet is it? His role over months has been to report on the clashes in Portland between Antifa and groups such as Patriot Prayer. This has involved standing next to and watching both groups. Err, so?
A bunch of visibly armed far-right protesters are talking about how they’re going to engage in violence.
An ‘impartial’ journalist and reporter is stood right next to them throughout.
What happens next?
a. he reports it to the police
b. he at least mentions it in one of his ‘impartial’ reports
c. he does precisely fuck-all, until an undercover video of the incident is released.
If you chose c you’re a winner
In this context, the word “often” is meaningless. The only way for it have any validity is to determine for a given area and time range the ratio between false incidents and true ones. Then you would have to give your subjective opinion as to what percentage of fake incidents is necessary to apply the word “often.” Would it be 1%, 10%, 20% or something else? The use of words such as “often” or “many” creates problems in understanding unless it is made clear as to how the speaker or writer defines them.
Fair point. I’d say that “often” here means sufficiently often that, on hearing of such an incident, a sensible person waits for verification before believing it.
As for what the ratio is, I’d only be guessing, but at a wild stab, 50:50 could be a rule of thumb.
“As for what the ratio is, I’d only be guessing, but at a wild stab, 50:50 could be a rule of thumb.”
This is why Ngo’s list is so pernicious. You, an intelligent person, have come away believing that _half of all reports of hate crimes_ are made up.
So of the people who report that they’ve been attacked or harassed on account of their ethnicity or gender or sexuality, half of them are liars.
Do you think, given that by the FBI’s own figures there were over 7,000 reported hate crimes in America in 2017(and the figures have climbed since then), that the list to which you linked might have led you astray a little?
There are around 130-140 stories in The link. A significant proportion of them were just Twitter feeds or Facebook comments or campus controversies, and didn’t involve the police at all. And remember these were collated from across more than three years. And in one year alone the FBI noted more than 7,000 reports of hate crimes.
The idea that 50% of allegations are fake is just mental. It simply cannot be anything like that high.
Comparing the stories in the link you gave with the FBI’s own figures the most reasonable estimate would seem to be around the 1% figure.
“You, an intelligent person, have come away believing that _half of all reports of hate crimes_ are made up.”
Well no, I was far more hesitant in my wording than saying I “believe” that. I really don’t know.
“… the FBI’s own figures there were over 7,000 reported hate crimes in America in 2017 …”
Reported? So how do we know how many of them were real crimes? Out of interest, how many led to convictions?
“The idea that 50% of allegations are fake is just mental. It simply cannot be anything like that high.”
Why not?
“Comparing the stories in the link you gave with the FBI’s own figures the most reasonable estimate would seem to be around the 1% figure.”
But is it fair to compare a list of 100 hoaxes cases compiled by one journalist with the total of reports (note that *your* word here is “reports”) to the FBI?
I really don’t know — honestly I don’t — but lists such as Ngo’s makes me suspicious.
“Why can’t it be 50%?” Because it’s an utterly absurd claim. Just look at the statistics and think about what you’re saying. Half of all the people who report a hate-crime have made it up…just get some perspective on that claim because you don’t seem to see how unreasonable it is.
“Reported? So how do we know how many of them were real crimes? Out of interest, how many led to convictions?”
This is entirely irrelevant since Ngo’s list specifically claims the stories in his link are outright ‘hoaxes’. Not ‘allegations that didn’t lead to convictions’.
“But is it fair to compare a list of 100 hoaxes cases compiled by one journalist with the total of reports (note that *your* word here is “reports”)* to the FBI?”
Since they are culled from across three years, compared with just one year of FBI stats(2017, just before hate crime reports spiked again), and since they use sources drawn from Twitter, Facebook and simple campus gossip, and since they were sent to him by many different contributors who gave him a heads-up about the stories…then yes, I’d argue it most certainly is.
It disturbs me that someone at a rationalist website would leap to that 50-50 claim on the basis of such a flimsy, partisan list, that was compiled with a specific political angle.
I remember your posts here from over the years. They were intelligent and reasonable – but that 50-50 claim is just loony-tunes stuff. It’s a perfect example of an availability bias.
*NB they are police reports, collated from various police forces across the US. They are not just tips that the FBI gets phoned in, in case that’s what you thought.
I think anyone claiming to know what ratio is bonkers is in the wrong. We simply don’t know. “Reports” are just that: reports. We have no idea as to the veracity of them.
I’m not claiming they’re 50/50, but I’m not going to claim I know what the ratio is, or whether or not that guess is simply unreasonable just because there are so many “reports.” Reports don’t mean anything if we have no evidence for them or their veracity, and we can’t castigate someone for making their own conclusion when we, too, form our own conclusions based on the same scant evidence, which is what you, I, and Coel all do.
My basic point is that we don’t know! Here is a comment from a group campaigning against hate crime (link):
“Hate crimes are notoriously difficult to prosecute, because attorneys must prove the defendant’s intent was based on bias. Adding hate crime charges can introduce layers of complexity to otherwise straightforward cases of assault or vandalism. A ProPublica investigation found that of the nearly 1,000 hate crime cases reported to police in Texas from 2010 to 2015, fewer than 10 were successfully prosecuted.”
So how can we know (especially if we include allegations made to the media, colleges or schools, not just those made formally to the police)?
I wouldn’t claim to know for sure what the figure is. But I would claim that 50% is nowhere near the real figure, and I’d be alarmed if people went around believing such a thing.
There has been no evidence anywhere in this thread that the percentage is anything like that high, and a great deal of evidence that it’s a hell of a lot lower.
Comparing the vast number of reported hate crimes across America with the comparatively tiny number of them that turn out to be hoaxes it seems to me that 50% is not a rational estimate.
More interesting to me would be to know in how many cases something is labeled a hate crime based on an assumed motivation for which there is no evidence.
And the reverse Denise. How many real reported hate crimes don’t get categorised as such because guidelines, lack of clear motivational evidence etc. It swings both ways. At least a third of incidents proposed as hate crimes are rejected by the relevant law authority – not the crime, but the categorisation. [in the PDF I put up]
Which is why I’m not sure about the whole concept of hate crimes.
These occur infrequently but they often get an enormous amount of press, even sparking demonstrations (sometimes violent) and they stoke the racial and social divides that plague us. So they seem to occur often even though they are actually infrequent compared to real hate crimes. There is a lesson in there somewhere.
HOAX HATE CRIMES: How does 0.3% grab you Coel?
Source: VICE NEWS, FEB 2019
OK, so 16 out of 6,121 reported hate crimes (0.3%) were found to be hoaxes? So does that mean the other 6105 are known to be real crimes? And we know they were real crimes because there was a conviction in court? If so, yes, I’m completely wrong.
I strongly suspect, however, that what this means is that 16 were *proven* to be hoaxes, that some number in the hundreds led to convictions, and that for the majority of those 6000 we simply don’t know either way.
If that is wrong, and it’s more the former than the latter, then please point me at the study saying so.
I don’t think “percentage that result in conviction” provides much of a guide to how many reported hate crimes are hoaxes.
According to the FBI’s 2017 crime statistics there were 1,247,321 violent crimes and 7,694,086 property crimes reported nationwide that year. Of those crimes there were, respectively, 518,617 violent crime arrests and 1,249,757 property crime arrests. (Obviously, the conviction rate for these crimes is lower than the arrest rate.)
This in no way suggests that all the reported crimes for which there has been no arrest are hoaxes. Similarly, I see no basis for assuming that reported hate crimes that do not result in arrest (much less conviction) should be presumed to be hoaxes either.
“I see no basis for assuming that reported hate crimes that do not result in arrest (much less conviction) should be presumed to be hoaxes either.”
I absolutely agree, and didn’t mean to suggest that. What I meant is that all we really know is that the “hoax” rate is greater than the (rather low) rate of *proven* hoaxes, and less than the (rather high) rate of reports for which there is no conviction.
I don’t see how we can, without difficulty, come up with a fact based, informed opinion of what percentage of incidents are faked.
SPLC’s Levin is quoted extensively here, but then there is this:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hate-crime-hoaxes-are-more-common-than-you-think-11561503352
It does seem like a very high number of the high profile cases which initially generate great outrage turn out to be false. But again, “seems like” is not quantifiable data.
Levin & his team have stated, according to the NYT, that they believe hoaxes to run at 1% NOT 50% MY SOURCE
How about you putting up something Coel – a SUBSTANTIAL link, that approaches your ridiculous, intuitive “wild stab, 50:50 could be a rule of thumb”? Something from somebody with expertise in policing, or crime or … hate crime.
Here’s a 137 page CHSE 2019 REPORT BY PROF. BRIAN LEVIN [PDF] that goes into hate crime in excruciating detail.
Just as an example from the above PDF Levin & his team list hate crimes by category in the below mentioned tables & if you look you’ll see that it’s impossible for even 10% of those to be hoaxes [read each line to see why that’s so]:
Page 48&49: 41 incidents of crimes & threats against civilian public officials 2018-2019
Page 50&51: 42 incidents of crimes & threats against conservative or MAGA supporters, 2018-2019
Show me your receipts Coel.
“Levin & his team have stated, according to the NYT, that they believe hoaxes to run at 1% NOT 50% …”.
Your source doesn’t quite say that, it’s paraphrased. But, ok, can you point me at exactly how they arrived at that estimate (a 137 page document is long!).
But, anyhow, does the US have a conviction rate of 99% for hate crime? Meaning, that 99% of hate-crime complaints made to the police lead to a conviction?
If so, I’m impressed by how good your police are! But I strongly suspect that the conviction rate is small (elsewhere I quoted: “of the nearly 1,000 hate crime cases reported to police in Texas from 2010 to 2015, fewer than 10 were successfully prosecuted”).
If so, then how do Levin and his team deduce that only 1% are false? Genuine question, by the way.
They’re not leaping from “only 1% are *proven* false” to “only 1% are false” are they?
If you can’t be arsed to peruse the PDF Coel then I’m finding you no more links. You know by now that your 50:50 claim is nonsense & I know you’ll not turn up a 50:50 figure from any source.
All you’re doing now is wriggling & nitpicking If you’d claimed say 5% hoax rate I’d not have been concerned, because it’s probably within a reasonable plus or minus ball park of being correct, but 50% is a loony claim.
Like I requested from you before – let’s see you’re receipts. YOU do some work!
you’reyourSorry, but that’s just evasive. And it fails to answer the basic question: how does anyone know that the “hoax” rate is only 1%, when the conviction rate is vastly, vastly lower than 99%?
[And, I didn’t really make any 50:50 claim, I suggested it as a “wild stab” for “these kinds of allegations”. The onus is surely on anyone claiming a 1% hoax rate to substantiate the claim.]
My expert witness is Prof. Levin as reported by the NYT. The NYT quote I’m referring to is this:
Someone else on the subject of faked hate crimes:
SOURCE Your “stab” is worthless Coel.
Coel is almost certainly wrong, but he DOES have a point. I did have the time to look over that PDF and his original criticism stands – those low number of hoaxes are reports that have been proven to BE hoaxes. They are counter posed in the report, as you do here, to reports of hate crimes NOT reports of hate crimes that proved to be real. Elsewhere Coel cites data that shows of 1000 hate crimes brought to trial only 10 got convictions. That suggests an elemental problem with comparing the frequency one set of things known to be true with the frequency of another for which the truth is not known.
It’s regrettable that this discussion has gotten so heated here because although I agree I cannot see how it can be true that hoaxed hate crime are equal in number to real ones none of the data shown so far demonstrates that.
It’s a question of rigor in the claims of fact that I think Coel is getting at and in that he is correct.
Your assessment is reasonable I think Edward M.
Well said, Edward, and a fair middle ground.
“The center believes that less than 1 percent of all reported hate crimes are false.”
Does it? Do I trust them? No. You can also find academics who claim that the rate of false rape accusation is similarly low. I looked into it, I read the original paper being cited.
The original paper is Lisak et al 2010. I show the central data table here.
The data have “false report” as 6%. They also have “case did not proceed” as 45%, “case proceeded” (not necessarily a conviction) as 35%, and “insufficient information” as 14%.
So what is the actual false-allegation rate, given that for most of these we just don’t know?
Well, the authors simply take the 6% **known** to be false accusations as the overall false-accusation rate. That’s what they do — read the abstract. Read the paper yourself, google Lisak etal 2010 “False Allegations of Sexual Assault: An Analysis of Ten Years of Reported Cases”.
I suspect your Levin et al of doing exactly the same, namely taken the rate of *proven* hoaxes to be the rate of hoaxes, when for 80% or 90% of the cases we don’t know either way.
Do I trust far-left academics to be honest on this? Well no, sadly, no I don’t. Sorry.
And note that Levin himself words it: “Less than 1% of hate crimes are **proven** false reports.” (Tweet)
If 1% result in a conviction, and 1% are *proven* hoaxes, with 98% being neither of those, how do we know the actual hoax rate?
EdwardM My original point was simply that a 50-50 figure is utterly, utterly absurd.
The onus is on the person who could possibly leap to such a self-evidently extreme position to justify it, and so far no-one has done that. There has been not the tiniest shred of evidence that the figure is anything like that – on the contrary, there’s been plenty of evidence that it is between one and two orders of magnitude less.
Those are not trivial differences and you cannot find justification for them by talking about cases that didn’t result in convictions.
Remember, we’re talking about hoaxes specifically: the opposite of a conviction for a hate crime is NOT a hoax. That is an absurd way to think. There are an enormous number of different reasons why a conviction might not be attained, and plenty of them are specifically related to prejudice and the systemic disadvantages entailed by it. (I’m not even going to get into the number of hate crimes that simply go unreported – I haven’t even googled that particular wrinkle in the argument.)
The argument put forward by Coel is the opposite of a rationalist argument, in fact it is specifically the kind of rhetorical legerdemain that religious people try and get away with(and which atheists consistently and correctly pull them up for) – ‘how do you know it isn’t true?’…’how do you know there isn’t a god?’…’how do you know that half of all people who say they were racially abused aren’t liars?’.
Nope, not falling for that.
And more to the point I’m going to bed, and I can’t sleep as it is, so fuck this for a game of conkers.
I think the problem, Saul, is that you keep using words like “self-evidently” and “utterly, utterly absurd” when neither side has data to back it up. And that you kind of besmirched Coel’s intelligence/rationalism by saying that his previous comments over the years made you conclude that he was a better thinker than this.
I’m sorry you see a problem in what I’ve posted BJ but I’ve said it a few times now – no-one here has given any evidence that the figure is anywhere near that high.
And if a person really think it’s reasonable to claim that half of all hate-crime reports are hoaxes(not just incorrect, or misguided, or more complicated, but outright hoaxes) then, yes, I question that person’s rationality very much, in the same way you would if I were to make a claim as extreme as that in the opposite political direction. It is manifestly absurd.
I made it clear that I have respected Coel’s opinions in the past, I also made it clear that I think he’s intelligent, which is exactly why I find this kind of claim so bewildering.
If you have a problem with my calling the 50-50 claim ridiculous I would sincerely like you to show me how it is not. Everyone is fallible on both sides. If my political biases have blinded me to the possibility that half of all reports of hate crimes are ‘hoaxes’ then I’d genuinely like to know about that.
I do not want to be in error, and I would be massively in error in this case if it turned out Coel’s claim was even vaguely plausible.
“If you have a problem with my calling the 50-50 claim ridiculous I would sincerely like you to show me how it is not. Everyone is fallible on both sides.”
I don’t have a problem with it, but if I don’t, I can’t have a problem with Coel either. I don’t think you’re being blinded at all by your political biases. It’s like I said and like you just said above: nobody has any evidence on either side, so I don’t see how either conclusion can be called anything but speculative. I’m more inclined to lean toward your opinion, but I won’t call Coel’s manifestly absurd because, just as I don’t have evidence to back up a 50/50 claim, I don’t have any evidence to back up your claim that it’s absurd either. If I was pushed to give my own answer, my shot in the dark would be 75/25 or even 85/15, but who knows? Again, I have no data to back it up. Nobody has any data to back up their feeling on the matter. But I’m closer to your feeling on it than Coel’s. I’ll never take a stab at it because I know I can’t research it properly. All I can do is take it on a case-by-case basis.
I would just like to note once more on behalf of Coel, though, that he only said 50/50 was a “wild stab.” He never claimed it was the actual ratio.
Perhaps there is a way to intuit how close to 50/50 or close to 0 such hoaxes are if we think about what it would look like if half of all reported house break ins were hoaxes. I think if that were the case, you’d see insurance premiums sky rocket. The police would tire of hoax claims and try to deter them by fining those who caused them to investigate something unnecessarily. A house alarm would be ignored because it was probably fake. What would be the equivalent for hate crimes?
“And if a person really think it’s reasonable to claim that half of all hate-crime reports are hoaxes(not just incorrect, or misguided, or more complicated, but outright hoaxes) then, yes, I question that person’s rationality …”
Just for the record, my 50:50 “wild stab” comment did not use the word “hoax” (it was a reply to “ratio between false incidents and true ones”), and did not use the phrase “hate-crime reports”, but the vaguer “incidents” echoing “these kind of allegations”. By “incidents” I was more thinking of “incidents that could have been written to push people’s buttons, and receive wide publicity owing to that”.
I still don’t claim to know what the ratio is. I’m betting that (in logarithmic terms) it is nearer 50% and 1%.
BJ & Coel – I won’t post any more on this – I’ve laid out my arguments, you’ve laid out yours.
As ever, the manners of WEIT commenters are impeccable, even when I heavily disagree with them.
Indeed, Saul, and that’s why this is the only place I post 🙂
By the way, there’s a very similar issue regarding rape allegations. The oft-made claim is that “only 2% of rape allegations are false”. We don’t know that. No study shows that. What it means is that a low number are *proven* false. But the vast majority of rape cases come down to one person’s word against another, which is why the conviction rate is very small. For the majority of rape allegations we do not have proof they are true, but nor do we have proof they are false. We simply don’t know the false-allegation rate. (I wrote about that here.)
This is a good point – on the one hand you have “reports” on the other “proven false reports”. There is an asymmetry there that cannot have escaped the attention of researchers. I’d be curious also to see what the real rates are.
Again that misses something important out: the fact that a significant(heavily significant according to many) number of rapes are not reported at all. Women never mention them to the police in the first place. They happen and the women don’t want to go through with the trauma of reporting it, having their private parts swabbed, reporting the details over and over again, etc.
Ken and Michael…the cavalry have arrived 🙂
Also:
“Doing research for a book, Hate Crime Hoax, I was able to easily put together a data set of 409 confirmed hate hoaxes. An overlapping but substantially different list of 348 hoaxes exists at fakehatecrimes.org, and researcher Laird Wilcox put together another list of at least 300 in his still-contemporary book Crying Wolf. To put these numbers in context, a little over 7,000 hate crimes were reported by the FBI in 2017 and perhaps 8-10% of these are widely reported enough to catch the eye of a national researcher.”
The writer is: “Wilfred Reilly is an associate professor of political science at Kentucky State University, …” (link)
The INITIAL REPORT, 26TH SEPT. from NBC Washington [who interviewed the girl] contains this para:
And yet that NBC report put up her name & photo & all the reports I’ve looked at follow that bad example. Is this normal in US media? Is there no rules for the press re juveniles?
They may have done all of that with permission of the parents. They used them on TV in the report as well. The really screwed up thing today is how quick journalism is pulling the trigger without waiting for the police. I don’t think it took them more than a day to discover it was made up. To fool the parents, that is easy but to go with the story so fast, not good.
Thank you for doing the research to provide these facts. My son tries to keep me “on the straight and narrow” by insisting I provide dependable sources for “information” I share with him. Many times I can’t find the appropriate documentation afterwards, and give up. Would that I had the kind of mind that retained the sources with the information.
I think the OP is not quite right. I read the original story by Christine Hauser and Neil Vigdor on September 27; that’s the article that got the revised headline on September 30. The updated story with the revised headline has a tag before the lede that says “Update: Sept. 30, 2019 On Monday, the girl recanted her story, and her family apologized in a statement.” That update includes a link to the second story by Niraj Chokshi. That second story also has a headline that doesn’t say anything about the ethnicity of anyone involved, and doesn’t include photographs of anyone involved (just a generic photo of the school). So the OP contrasts two different stories by different reporters that got different headlines; the switch applies only to the updated version of the first story.
Yes, Greg is in the process of updating the post above, and the real story is even worse than I suspected, because the paper has negated the story not just in the headline, but in an update preceding the original article, something it does either never or very rarely. This in effect cancels the original story, perhaps because premature publication made the paper look bad. I’ve asked Greg to write an update to the post above, so stay tuned.
Premature or not I question whether the story was something the Times should have reported. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that in years past they would have left this sort of story to others to cover.
When does a single event of a child being bullied at school warrant national coverage by our so-called paper of record?
Clicks.
Because it ‘proves’ the inherent evil of the White Male(tm).
And as the ‘woke’ seem to believe the purpose of the law is to give justice to the ‘Survivor’ (Phe person who made the accusation) and the ‘perp’ (the accused, or whoever fits the description provided by the Survivor.) the process they are due, of course it needs national coverage, how else is the virtual lynch mob to be gathered to punish the ‘guilty’ and those insufficiently zealous.
I know it’s perhaps different at different papers, but do editors make the headlines at the NYT, or do the writers?
I’m sure it’s the editors.
In which case the author is likely irrelevant and the editor made the changes for the reasons you gave.
Sorry, I’m a bit dozy at the mo so I had trouble following that. Is there still an issue with the headlines, and if so what is it?
Thanks for the sleuthing, Mike.
I think the point remains that whereas the recantation articles contained no race references, at least some of the accusation ones did.
Doubtful it would ever be the other way around.
As far as I’m aware, the story was first reported in the Washington Post and then picked up nationally. Nobody ever bothered to try and first get a hold of the apparently existing video from the playground, nor allow an investigation before reporting it as the truth.
I know many people who were absolutely outraged that this hate crime occurred. But people are like the news: outrage first, correct later (except, in both cases, they often don’t bother correcting).
I’ve become cynical after the hijab attack incident so I figured I’d wait until all this was confirmed since I just knew the papers hadn’t verified much.
Yeah, there was a rash of these hoaxes right after Trump was elected, and I’ve been cynical and skeptical about them since then. I of course know they happen, but the media only seems to report the most outrageous and polarizing ones, which also happen to be the ones most likely to get them in trouble and make good, honest people like us question things, even when we sometimes shouldn’t.
It’s like false accusations of anything: all you’re doing is hurting the real cause of reducing the bad thing by making people more skeptical when they hear of it happening. The social justice movement has done a great job of this in just about every sector in which they claim to be trying to help.
The practice of fact-checking presupposes the existence of an objective reality, ascertainable (to a usable degree) by following certain rules of evidence. It also implies that the written word is important enough to merit the attempt to ascertain objective reality. These principles are being rejected in some surprising places. In an Atlantic article, George Packer (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/10/when-the-culture-war-comes-for-the-kids/596668/ ) reported that a program of “bias training” required of all New York City school employees declares “Objectivity” and “Worship of the Written Word” to be forms of “White Supremacy Culture” that ought to be disrupted.
What is it called when you publish half-baked, unverified, and/or false stories to promote an ideological narrative and disseminate false impressions of fact in the public?
Well, today it is called mainstream journalism.
In the old days, I could read the WSJ and ignore the editorial page and feel like I was getting some objective information about the world–before Murdoch bought it–today, everything is Breitbart:
NYT is corporate-globalist left Breitbart (global neo-feudalist plantation with an anti-racist HR department),
RT is Slav Breitbart (doesn’t Putin look fetching on horseback?),
Huffington Post is narcissistic liberal arts grad fem Breitbart (Let me tell you about my hair),
WSJ is grumpy old man Trumpista Breitbart (Get off my lawn),
the Root is Afro-nationalist Breitbart (Don’t ask me about my hair), etc.
All crap, all the time.
To be honest I don’t understand what the accusation is against the NYT now. It seems to have changed a bit and I’m having trouble keeping up.
Upthread someone has claimed that the headlines were for two separate articles…but then there was other stuff that my tired brain could not follow.
Whatever it is, if this is enough to make it the equivalent of Breitbart then I think we might be getting a bit ahead of ourselves in the equivalency stakes. Some papers are just better than others. It’s not all a toss-up surely.
I lost all patience with the NYT’s when they were ginning up support for Bush’s elective war on Iraq via Judith Miller based on lies, for which they subsequently “apologized”.
If that is “left-wing”, then I don’t want any part of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller
So what is a reasonable, relatively balanced news source? It can’t be that bad surely.
Where do you go for news?
“Whatever it is, if this is enough to make it the equivalent of Breitbart then I think we might be getting a bit ahead of ourselves in the equivalency stakes. Some papers are just better than others. It’s not all a toss-up surely.”
That didn’t make much sense; what I meant was that the media landscape isn’t so hideously degraded by political and corporate bias as you fear, and some places have higher standards than others. Everything isn’t Breitbart(otherwise I’d jump off a building). It’s not just a total toss-up.
It seems reasonable for the NYT to emphasize that the girl was black in the first headline as it was thought to be a racially motivated crime. It seems less reasonable to mention her as black in the second headline as it was then no longer a racially motivated crime. Well, I suppose her faking the crime still has a racial dimension but I’m willing to let the NYT off on that. The NYT may be getting more woke but this seems to be a little too nitpicky to me.
That’s one interpretation. I see it as a conscious decision on the part of NYT editors to ensure that they do whatever possible to make sure brown people don’t look bad. They had no such compunctions for the true victims here – the white boys falsely accused.
After reading the update explaining that the NYT changed a headline of an already published story, that seems totally wrong to me. Perhaps in the case where the original title was inaccurate but, even then, I feel like the original should be left alone and the update posted next to it.
It would be nice if there was some sort of publishing code of ethics that was updated for the modern electronic publishing and social media. It’s hard to imagine that such a code doesn’t exist. Does anyone know about that?
For those subscribing to comments, please read Greg’s update, which corrects a couple of things I got wrong. To me, the corrected account is even worse because the Times CHANGED THE HEADLINE OF THE ORIGINAL STORY COMPLETELY, negating that story in a way I’ve never seen before. But see Greg’s update in the post.
We were Smolletted.
I do wonder if conservatives have become so Otherized to the left that they (the left) have developed a credulous naivety in this area (sort of similar to how you occasionally see foreign propaganda about the US, and wonder how anyone could believe it, while citizens in those countries find it entirely convincing.) I wonder how much this being a Christian school where Karen Pence teaches poisoned the well on this one, if the media was quicker to jump the gun because this aligns with a sort of caricature of how they believe such people must be.
That’s not to say that the media should be expected to demonstrate clairvoyance about which stories will turn out to be true and which won’t, but there’s also basic skepticism and fact checking. The girl’s original story sounded strange – she’s 12 and she said she was playing by herself on the slide? 12 is pretty old for that. I’ve heard reports that the school has security cameras, which meant verifying the story, if it were true, would have been relatively easy by waiting 24 hours or so. This is a national news story based on the word of a 12-year-old kid’s report of what happened on the playground – could they not have waited on a police report or statement? Etc.
“The girl’s original story sounded strange – she’s 12 and she said she was playing by herself on the slide? 12 is pretty old for that.”
Just congenially curious, how much younger would she have to be that you would not consider her “pretty old” to slide down a slide? Would you say the same for the teeter-totter or swings or monkey bars?
Guess I only typed “F” instead of “Filippo.”
Hence, apparently, “Your comment is awaiting moderation.”
K through 2nd grade, maybe? A slide is a solitary activity, typically at 12 kids don’t sit on it and do the traditional “Whee! I’m sliding!” thing alone, if they’re on it at that age they’re likely just sitting on the ladder and hanging out with a group of friends. 12 year old girls tend to sit together and talk during recess.
The most serious attempt (that I could find) to quantify the rate of hoaxes among hate crimes is from Wilfred Reilly, assistant professor of political science at Kentucky State University. For his book Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War (I apologize for reporting the title: I hope I will ont be considered alt-right adjacent), in which he assembled a database of 409 hoaxes over 2010-2017. The independent database http://www.fakehatecrimes.org/ has currently cataloged 371 hoaxes (mainly from the US). The most disturbing aspect to me: nearly all highly publicized cases (typically the ones sufficiently outrageous to go viral) turned out to be fake.
Quoting the book above (note 1):
I won’t post any more here tonight, but I will simply ask anyone to do exactly what you have unwisely provided a link for them to do, and go and look at ‘fakehatecrime.org’ for its list of instances of ‘hate crime hoaxes’.
Remember, these are all fake hate crimes! Separate instances thereof, so more than 300. How disgustingly dishonest must those people be if there are so many instances of hoaxes?
Which makes it puzzling that in the first thirty that I looked at, TWO of the stories were about Jussie Smollett, one was an anonymous twitter thread asking ‘questions’ of David Lammy(a _British_ MP), one is simply a Quillette article about whether hate crime is ‘overcooked’ in the UK, at least two are simply references to an interview with the author you already quoted, etc. I stopped looking once it became clear that half of it’s random junk vaguely related to the subject.
Wilfred Reilly claims: “the website fakehatecrimes has published a substantially different list of 341 [371 now, ndr]incidents”.
It hasn’t – so he’s either lying or hasn’t visited the site. Either way that should tell you a lot about the man and his integrity.
“Alt-right-adjacent” sounds about right.
My question is: why should this have been national news in the first place? A girl (allegedly) had part of her hair cut off by some boys in elementary school. That’s… not very significant. On its own that could be a prank, a case of ongoing bullying, or possibly something with racial elements, but it ought to be a case for the school administrators and maybe local news on a slow day.
The NYT pushed this out because it fit the narrative of evil racists lurking everywhere in America, and only by constantly pushing that narrative can the woke feel like they are demonstrating their virtue. If there were really a culture of insidious, explicit racism at this school/town that would be something, but I don’t think the original article came anywhere close to establishing that. Does every incident of minor bullying from black kids with white victims get reported? Of course not and it shouldn’t.
Fox News goes trawling for stories of censorious college students and criminal migrants; the woke left goes looking for any tale of invidious cis-het whites. Neither is going to give you a picture with any perspective and both are likely to miss context or even outright hoaxes like (apparently) this.
I’m sure its more than just appealing to the woke. The MSM is populated by liberals wanting to demonstrate the destruction that Trump’s presidency is causing. They also like human interest stories because most people seem to like them. I’m not interested in appealing to the woke, do want to see Trump’s effects on society highlighted, but would prefer real news over most human interest stories. But that’s just me.
Well said by both you and the OP.
You and I may have different definition of ‘woke’ 🙂 I don’t think everyone at the Times is a full on twitter warrior, but to me “demonstrating the destruction that Trump’s presidency is causing” with a story about playground hair-snipping is a symptom of wokeness. There are plenty of real stories about Trump’s destruction of our political system, our environment, our international standing, our financial security, etc. but this ain’t it.
There is no connection to Trump in this story (Mike Pence’s wife works at the school but had no involvement in the incident) except to imply some general moral malaise emanating from the oval office. For all his faults Trump hasn’t actually done much of anything to black people, nor has he made them a target of his rhetoric.
As for human interest, I maintain a story like this would never had made it into national news except that it advanced a woke narrative. Only much more egregious or unusual stories of school bullying would traditionally have made the cut.
There’s a difference between “appealing to the woke” and being woke. I was not accusing the NYT of the latter though perhaps some are.
The connection to Trump is not explicit. Trump has lowered the threshold on expressing racism and xenophobia. People with those thoughts feel increasingly able to express them freely. The MSM feels the need to show people that this is happening. The hair-cutting teenager story is just an example.
Although each individual event might seem less than earth-shaking, collectively they affect everyday life to a considerable degree. It’s similar to the “broken windows” theory of policing where fixing the little things is thought to increase regard for the community and reduce crime generally.
As far as I know, the MSM does not try to apply a consistent threshold for what gets reported. If the amount of racism expressed in a story they do publish is X, they do not feel compelled to report all stories having racism greater than X. They also tend to report single events, rather than trends with statistics, as they are personal rather than abstract.
I think the clearest evidence comes from simply noticing what gets reported and what doesn’t. Police shootings of unarmed people are primarily of white people. Most mass shootings are committed by black people. Interracial violence between blacks and whites is primarily black-on-white. The same is true for hate crimes between blacks and whites. But you won’t get that impression from the mainstream media.
If a white person does something to a black person and there’s even a slim possibility that it had a racial motivation, it’s likely to be widely reported and the races of the perpetrator and victim will be in the headline. If a black person attacks, robs, or kills a white man, even out of a clearly stated racial animus, it probably won’t be reported in the national news, but if it is, the races will almost certainly not be in the headline and probably not even in the body of the article. (Quite likely they’ll just say a “teen” or a “man” did it.)
It’s the same with corrections. When Jazmine Barnes was shot and it was claimed that a white man did it, the New York Times wrote a dozen articles about it decrying racism and white supremacy (as did most other big outlets). It was in the news continually. But when the killer turned out to be black, *poof*, the story just vanished. Few outlets issued a correction, and almost none did so with even a quarter of the prominence they gave the original story. (But I’m sure if a suspected black-on-black killing turned out to be white-on-black they’d all jump on that correction…)
There’s clearly a narrative that’s being pushed.
“What is much more unusual is the second change made– the Times negates the story not just in the headline, but in an update preceding the original article…In my experience, the Times hasn’t done this before (or so rarely I’ve never noticed). They do follow up articles, they add corrections at the bottom of the article, but they don’t change already published articles– to do so would be a falsification of history, and correctly, they don’t do such Orwellian re-writing. In this case they have not changed the text of the original article– we can still read the original story as put out by the Times— but they have changed the headline so as to make it clear that the original story is wrong.”
Contrary to this point, I have seen the NYT, WaPo, and many others do this many times in their online articles. They will go back a week later — long after, when they know nobody will see it — and change everything from language, entire sentences, and even sometimes the story itself. I believe this is the website from which people have posted these examples in the past:
http://www.newsdiffs.org/
If I may, in the spirit of contemplating hoaxes and bullying and hate crime: a few days ago the NY Times reported an alleged hate incident occurring on a school bus in upstate NY:
http://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/nyregion/gouverneur-children-hate-crime.html?searchResultPosition=3
The victim was black; the two assailants were white. Beyond that, there was not one word of evidence in the reporting in support of it being a hate crime. (Unless one takes as evidence “just so” statements by the school system and the honorable Gov. Cuomo. Who are such politicos to so bloviate prior to an investigation?) No doubt, what evidence there is will be presently forthcoming. Until then, seems to be the NYT’s knee-jerk default response.
What if a white girl was assaulted by two black girls? A black girl assaulted by two Asian girls? An Asian girl assaulted by a latina girl and a white girl? I’ll leave it to you to contemplate additional such combinations.
The attending bus aid/matron has been charged with child endangerment due to inaction. A separate incident mentioned in the article involved a school resource officer being fired for taking restraining action in dealing with aggressive students. (Everyone should clamor for the “privilege” of serving in such positions, including school superintendents and state governors.)
And this in the last day or so in the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/us/channing-smith-suicide-bisexual-tennessee.html?searchResultPosition=1
In both cases is it “mere” bullying or hate crime? (I’m reminded of the case of the Rutgers U. student several years ago who committed suicide by jumping off a bridge in response to a dorm suite mate’s social media violation of his privacy.)
In all three cases is it “troubled youth,” insufficient prefrontal lobe development and therefore insufficient impulse control? In the Tennessee case, I’d like to think that this would focus the foggiest adolescent mind on not blurting out and publishing on social media everything that pops into ones mind. Maybe even getting off social media totally until out of the high school bullying hothouse.
….aaaaand this morning, the Times works overtime to shoehorn a tragic case of mistaken identity leading to homicide with the false narrative that black people are unsafe in the US when there are so many gun-toting white cops “hunting down black men” (to borrow from BLM’s webpage).
An EX-cop walked into the wrong apartment thinking it was hers and shot the black resident dead. The jury found her guilty of murder. The Times painted the story as one of a long line of white cops shooting unarmed black people.
Yes the Times does this and it’s outrageous and divisive. They are intentionally pursuing ex-ante interpretations of news. But the question is, WHY do they do it? What is their goal? To change public perception/culture? Is it to raise white guilt and black anger at the system? In order to do, what exactly? To make it easier to enlarge government and raise taxes on wealthier whites for whatever purposes? If they pursue critical legal theory, is it to create a set of upside down Nuremburg laws where only non-whites have special privileges under the law (preferential college admissions, business loans, subsidized housing just for blacks, certain jobs just for blacks, preferential hiring)?
Examining and hypothesizing about the end goal of the Times would be a useful discussion.