The far-left and oh-so esteemed New Yorker magazine published a lie so massive it beggars belief — even in this, the era of fake news.
In the latest edition, Harvard professor and frequent New Yorker contributor Jill Lepore got away with publishing the following (in an effort to combat this ongoing epidemic, I do not link fake news)…
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.
Lepore and the New Yorker actually think we’re stupid enough to believe that 60 to 65 percent of males between the ages of 15 and 34 who are treated in an emergency room are treated for injuries at the hands of police officers or security guards.
In other words, if you walk into an emergency room, any emergency room in America, and see ten males aged 15 to 34 waiting to be treated, at least six have suffered injuries at the hands of the police or a security guard.
The New Yorker published that.
This outrageous lie was caught by UnHerd.com’s Louise Perry, who says she is such a fan of Lepore, she purchased multiple copies of the Harvard professor’s latest book to give to friends and family.
But while reading Lepore’s anti-police screed, Perry could not get that “two-thirds” number out of her head.
She then discovered that although the online New Yorker piece contained links to back up many of its claims, there was no link to this specific “study.”
After some good faith digging, Perry says she found the study Lepore is likely referring to and that Lepore got it horribly, terribly, unforgivably wrong. In fact, Perry searched for the actual number of what are known as “legal intervention injuries” and found that just 0.2 percent of males aged 15 to 34 treated in emergency rooms qualified – not 60 to 65 percent:
[I]t’s not clear where Lepore got the ‘two-thirds’ figure from. Possibly she misunderstood a line from from the paper itself, which includes the finding that 61.1% of people injured by police fell into the 15-34 age bracket. Or from the Harvard press release, which reports that:
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.
Which is to say, they were injured by hitting, rather than some other use of force. But I’m sorry to say that Lepore’s claim is straightforwardly false, as Feldman himself replied when asked by another twitter user: ‘Oh weird, the rate being the same as car accidents is true, but the other part is definitely not.’
I did my best to work out a rough estimate of the true proportion of 15-34 year olds visiting the ER who had suffered legal intervention injuries, and arrived at a figure of 0.2% (you can follow my working in this thread). So I believe Lepore’s claim to be off by a factor of several hundred.
I’m sorry but Lepore and the New Yorker do not receive the benefit of the doubt from me.
To begin with, why is there no link to the study? There are other links in the online New Yorker piece, why no link to this specific factoid?
I think we all know why.
If the New Yorker and Lepore had in fact made a good-faith error, if they misread the study (which happens to the best of us), there would be a link to the study.
Secondly, the lying we are seeing from the elite media, especially of late as we get closer to the 2020 presidential election — the shameless lying, the audacious attempts to deliberately mislead and misinform voters, is as bad as I’ve ever seen it.
Finally, the “two-thirds” statistic is absurd on its face… The very idea that two-thirds of young men sitting in your local emergency room are victims of “legal intervention injuries” is preposterous. Who would believe such a thing?
So, no, I do not believe this is a good-faith mistake.
As far as I’m concerned the motive is simple: Lepore and the New Yorker published a deliberate lie to validate the ongoing domestic terrorism of Black Lives Matter and Antifa, to guilt gullible elites who read the New Yorker into taking the side of “defunding the police” – which is easy to do when you’re an elite who won’t have to live with the consequences of a eunuch police force.
It is simply astonishing to me how many people continue to want to be misinformed and lied to by the corporate media. Even if you are a Trump-hating leftist, why would you want to be serially misled? Why would anyone continue to watch CNNLOL or MSNBC, or read the New York Times, Washington Post, and New Yorker?
You know what I think it is…? I think the left-wing consumers of these outlets – keep in mind there aren’t many of them – actually get a thrill out of reading these lies. What I mean is that they’re comforted by the idea that these name brand news outlets are publishing lies, are publishing propaganda.
There’s no other explanation – except that they’re so ignorant and bubbled they don’t know they’re being lied to.
But, honestly, is there anyone out there – even in Manhattan — dumb enough to actually believe 60 to 65 percent of young men sitting in emergency rooms were injured by law enforcement?
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