Talking heads explode: No hate crime increase from Trump rallies, study

(FILE PHOTO by Getty)

Several decidedly left-wing mainstream media outlets, including CNN (of course), ran a bogus research study last week accusing President Donald Trump of inciting hate crimes.

By comparing President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign rallies with the number of hate crimes reported in those localities, three professors determined that the president’s rallies allegedly correlate with a 226 percent increase in hate crime incidences.

Following the publication of this study, the media breathlessly ran with it — as did their allies, including the terrorism-affiliated Council on American-Islamic Relations:

Except that it turns out the entire study was bogus. How so? Because it lacked a “simple statistical control for county population,” according to researchers with the 41-year-old Reason Institute.

In a report for Reason magazine, they explained that it’s not accurate to “compar[e] counties with rallies to other counties without them.” Yet that’s what the professors did.

“Politicians tend to hold political rallies near where large numbers of people live,” the report reads. “And in places with more people, the raw number of crimes is generally mechanically higher.”

“Simply put, no one should be surprised that Orange County, California (population 3.19 million) was home to both more reported hate incidents (5) and Trump rallies (2) than Orange County, Indiana (population 19,840, which had zero of each).”

When Reason’s researchers went ahead and added a “simple statistical control for county population” to the original study, they found that “the estimated effect of Trump rallies on reported hate incidents to become statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

“The study is wrong, and yet journalists ran with it anyway,” the report concludes.

Whoops! #Journalism

But there’s more.

When conducting their study, the professors chose to only examine Trump’s rallies. What about failed Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s rallies, though?

When Reason’s clearly more skilled researchers replicated the original study but via data pertaining to Clinton’s rallies, guess what they found …

Clinton rallies contribute to an even greater increase in hate incidents than Trump rallies.

Read that, and then read that again …

Unfortunately, it’s already too late — and the media’s original reports (none of which have been corrected) have already gone viral and been consumed by countless Americans. And as of Thursday morning, they were still being shared by more unsuspecting folks.

In scrutinizing why such a bogus story was allowed to go viral, the folks at Reason magazine correctly noted that the majority of so-called “journalists” are liberal.

“[L]ike academics, journalists as a profession are overwhelmingly liberal, with four times as many reporters identifying as Democrats than as Republicans,” they wrote.

“Given how little scrutiny was required to reveal the flaws in the thesis that Trump rallies cause hate incidents, one cannot help but wonder whether its viral status was aided by journalists predisposed to believe its message. Would a study claiming Clinton rallies caused hate crimes to increase by 226 percent have been seized on equally enthusiastically? We are skeptical.”

And they’re not alone. A recently published study conducted by the PR firm Bospar found that a 53 percent majority of Americans are concerned about “fake news” reports,” while another large 34 percent are worried about “left-wing agendas.”

These results come amid a near-endless flurry of fake news by mainstream networks, especially CNN, which just this week ran with a patently false story accusing the president of having jeopardized the position of a CIA spy in Russia and forced the agency to extract him.

The CIA refuted the false claim late Monday evening. It was further learned that one of the parties actually responsible for the spy’s premature extraction was the media, i.e., the very same people who last week falsely claimed that the president is inciting hate crimes.

“As American officials began to realize that Russia was trying to sabotage the 2016 presidential election, the informant became one of the C.I.A.’s most important — and highly protected — assets,” The New York Times confirmed.

“But when intelligence officials revealed the severity of Russia’s election interference with unusual detail later that year, the news media picked up on details about the C.I.A.’s Kremlin sources.”

The Times added that, according to current intelligence officials, “media scrutiny of the agency’s sources alone was the impetus for the extraction.”

#ThisIsTheMedia, #ThisIsCNN

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Vivek Saxena

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