Washington Post “criminal justice” reporter Wesley Lowery is fond of talking down to ordinary mortals he thinks are less intelligent than he is. But he gets basic things wrong. Recently, he wrongly implied that residents of Washington, D.C. can’t vote for President. Washington, D.C. has a disproportionate voice in the selection of the President: It gets 0.6% of the electoral votes (3 out of 538), despite having only 0.2% of the U.S. population — over-representation by a factor of nearly three.
But Lowery said that D.C. residents have “no electoral say in who is appointed to the Supreme Court.” This is untrue: Washington, D.C. has three votes in the electoral college that picks the president. The Constitution provides that the president “shall appoint” Supreme Court justices.
Lowery’s inaccurate tweet was liked and shared by many other progressives. Five hundred fifty–three people liked his tweet, while 85 retweeted it. After his error was pointed out by James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, who observed that this “Washington Post reporter doesn’t know D.C. has three electoral votes,” he sought to make his tweet unavailable to Taranto’s readers, but did not retract his error or take down his own tweet.
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Lowery is the Washington Post reporter who pushes the false meme that the police are racist killers. He helps The Post peddle the claim that that police must be racist because a quarter of those shot by police are black, even though black people are only 13% of the population. But that statistic doesn’t reflect racism; it just reflects the higher crime rate in the black community and the fact that black suspects are disproportionately likely to pose a risk to police. As the Daily Wire notes, “40 percent of cop killers are black.” In 2015, 51% of all murders in America were committed by blacks, who, again, make up just 13% of the population.
Lowery’s false allegation of systemic racism in police shootings is rebutted by a study by a black Harvard economist. That study, “‘analyzing more than 1,000 officer-involved shootings across the country, reports that there is zero evidence of racial bias in police shootings.” The false meme of white cops singling out black people is also undercut by a study cited in the Wall Street Journal. As it noted, in “2015 a Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects.”
The Washington Post often gets the law wrong. On Saturday, we discussed how the Washington Post repeatedly gave an inaccurate legal definition of sexual assault — and how it falsely suggested that the Violence Against Women Act restricted the dissemination of information outside of court. The Washington Post did that even though smaller journalistic outlets such as Roll Call managed to get the law right regarding the Violence Against Women Act.
