Fact Checking the Fact Checkers #2

Let’s have a look at stand up for the facts Politifact and the great Bill McCarthy. Bill is fact checking a man that has a thousand times his intellect named Dennis Prager. I verified this datum with a group of 50 intelligence officers.

Bill’s fact checking post reads:

Dennis Prager ‘baselessly’ claims Black students commit overwhelming share of campus hate crimes

First, Bill states the claim is baseless. This is False. There have been numerous such incidents which we will list at the end of this piece, unlike McCarthy.

The Prager comment in question as quoted in Politifarce is as follows:

“Twitter will be flooded with hate, and a lot of it will come from people on the left who want to show how hate-filled it is,” Prager said April 26. “It’s like their race hoax industry. If you see a noose on a college dorm of a Black student, the odds are overwhelming that the noose was put there by a Black student. If you see the n-word on a dormitory building, the odds are overwhelming that a Black student actually did that. We’re filled with race hoaxes.”

McCarthy, missing the full point, laser focused on an allegorical comment and treated it as a declaration of fact. He then went on to detail Prager referencing the Jussie Smollett incident. In an exemplar piece of fact checking McCarthy wrote:

“Though a noose was involved in what Smollett framed as a racist and homophobic attack by supporters of then-President Donald Trump, Smollett was not a university student.”

Bill McCarthy

That is not a joke, that is an actual quote! No, seriously, it is a Bill McCarthy fact check quote. Fact checking may not be his forte.

Then McCarthy used the classic leftist reporter line of “people say.” In this instance, he used “experts who track hate crimes told PolitiFact that there isn’t even a nationwide data source that Prager could have used to pin down the number of incidents.”

While Bill did quote and name other “experts” in his article, for this line he left “who” out. It also didn’t occur to young William if there isn’t a source to track such data one can’t be dispositive. You know, like Muller couldn’t find evidence for exoneration.

McCarthy then flips to UCR crime reporting on hate crimes to claim whites commit more anti-black incidents than blacks (while ignoring per capita density by the way). Notice how McCarthy jumped from the topic of college to now consider all crimes.  Let us not forget the original sizzling piece of fact checking that “Smollett was not a university student.”

However, the telling part for a seasoned fact checker is the fact he didn’t pull out location data. On the same page referenced by McCarthy is a table for “location type.” Of the 2,988 location types, just 38 were associated with College/University. So why the omission? Because it wouldn’t take many incidents out of 38 to show a trend.

Did McCarthy look for college incidents? No! Did he source his stance that out of the 38 University incidents the overwhelming majority were not perpetrated by blacks? No! Did McCarthy dispel the race hoax theory by showing the majority of college incidents were not hoaxes? No!

What would McCarthy’s truth test show when applied to his own work?

This modern collection of professional fact reviewers are merely opinion writers. They start with their own biased narrative and then pursue fellow travelers to substantiate it.

References:

• Police say no hate crime in viral high school hijab incident
• BLM, Antifa activists convicted of arson after attempting to frame Proud Boys for their own crimes
• Student caught vandalizing water fountain with racist graphiti was black female student that was caught on video and made an admission
• Black Illinois student criminally charged for racist notes
• A student at Wright State who said she is the victim of a racist act no longer wants to speak to the police
• Alleged DC Swastika Perp is a Twice-Deported Mexican With Long Criminal Record
• A black student who said she was the victim of multiple attacks because of her race has been identified as a primary suspect in the alleged vandalism
• Surveillance shows vandals who wrote racial slur on cars at Providence College were black
• Iowa State ‘racist graffiti’ police report lacks witnesses, photos, description
• Pittsford CSD finds claims of racist taunts at soccer games were unfounded
• A 19-year-old black student at East Carolina University (ECU) arrested after allegedly posting a fake racist fraternity party invite, which read, “No blacks”
• Black woman accused of pretending to be white KKK member to terrorize neighbors
• Racist messages painted on Parkway Central HS property were painted by black student
• Police arrest black man for vandalizing Emory Autism Center with racist graffiti, swastikas
• Black student who set fire to her dorm in hate-crime hoax awaits court hearing
• After a year’s investigation into a noose reportedly found in a building under construction, the FBI could find no evidence of an actual hate crime being committed
• Two black guys painted a swastika and a hood symbol on cars and vandalized them
• Anti-black graffiti was made by a black student