When a left-leaning journalist or academic rails about “misinformation,” it typically means factually accurate information that is politically inconvenient for them, and which they therefore dismiss as lacking the “necessary context” that favors their political position.
A classic example is how journalists like Radley Balko and academics like Marc Owen Jones dismiss evidence that white people are not unusually violent by calling it “misinformation” when non-progressives like Elon Musk cite such evidence. Crime statistics show that whites are not more violent. The rates of committing homicide “for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites” between 1976 and 2005, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics in its publication, Homicide Trends in the United States. In 2019, 6,425 black people committed homicide, compared to only 4,728 white people, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports.
On May 5, Elon Musk commented on a tweet by End Wokeness correctly citing federal crime statistics showing that there were 547,948 “interracial violent crime incidents” committed by blacks against whites in 2018, compared to 112,365 committed by whites against blacks. Thus, federal statistics show blacks committed over 400,000 more violent crimes against whites than whites committed against blacks. Musk pointed out that some journalists inaccurately leave the contrary impression, asking “why would the media misrepresent the real situation to such an extreme degree”? Journalists like Balko who focus on criminal justice issues highlight the relatively rare instances in which whites kill blacks, such as the death of an aggressive black homeless man on the subway who was restrained by a white marine veteran and died as a result. But in reality, blacks are much more likely to kill whites than whites are to kill blacks.
Marc Owen Jones argued that Musk’s tweet was “racist misinformation,” and that the tweet Musk agreed with was “misleading and racist.” Jones did not argue that the statistic in the tweet Musk agreed with was factually false. Indeed, he expressly admitted it was accurate: “The numbers presented are actually accurate and taken from a 2018 US Bureau of Statistics Report on Violent Victimization. Specifically, the data is taken from Table 14.” But he complained this accurate information was “misinformation” because Musk did not also include information about “intra-racial violence,” only “the figures” that “relate to inter-racial violence only.” Calling Musk’s tweet “misleading” and “dumb,” Radley Balko endorsed Jones’ thread attacking Musk.
But Musk never suggested most crimes were inter-racial — indeed, he previously has noted that crime is disproportionately black-on-black, rather than inter-racial — so Jones did not prove that anything Musk said was wrong or misleading. As the Twitter user Satoru Satu pointed out to Jones, “The data was accurate, you just don’t like it because it undermines the left’s toxic racial narrative.”
Musk’s tweet correctly took aim at the widespread, false progressive assumption that whites are more prone to commit violence, especially against blacks. For several years, progressives have falsely claimed that whites are unusually violent. For example, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar falsely claimed that “white men” are “causing most of the deaths within this country,” a claim that is at odds with federal crime statistics. She told the TV network Al Jazeera that “our country should be more fearful of white men across our country because they are actually causing most of the deaths within this country.”
In surveys, progressives mistakenly say that whites are more violent than blacks. One example is the 2020 American National Election Studies survey. A white progressive falsely claimed “there are millions of black people being hunted down and murdered by the police.” She made this claim in discussing the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown, an African-American, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The media, such as CNN, had widely disseminated the false claim that Brown was murdered after saying “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” That false claim triggered rioting, looting, and arson in cities such as Ferguson. But later, the Obama Justice Department issued a report debunking that claim, noting on page 82 that “the shots fired” by the police officer “were in self-defense.”
Progressives harbor this misconception that white people are unusually violent because they vastly overstate the number of police shootings of unarmed black people, often by a factor of 40 or more—exaggerating police killings by around 4,000 percent. That leads some of them to falsely believe that police are literally hunting black people, when police are not doing anything of the sort.
As researcher Zach Goldberg noted in 2021, “A recent nationally representative survey commissioned by Skeptic Mag asked respondents to estimate the number of unarmed blacks killed by police in 2019. Overall, 44% of liberals guessed 1,000 or more.” But “the actual figure is 27,” according “to the Mapping Police Violence database,” which includes killings by off-duty cops and non-shooting deaths. Moreover, “the average liberal respondent also thought that a clear majority of people killed by police in 2019 were black (in actuality, roughly a quarter were).”
In 2019, 9 unarmed black people were shot and killed by police while on duty, compared with 19 whites, in a country of over 330 million people. A study by the black Harvard economist Roland Fryer found that race is not a significant factor in police shootings.
The reality, as Elon Musk has pointed out, is that whites are not unusually violent, and inter-racial violence is far more likely to be committed by blacks against whites, than by whites against blacks.
Defining “misinformation” to include accurate information, the way Marc Owen Jones and Radley Balko do, is increasingly common among progressives. The progressive Global Disinformation Index, which was funded by the State Department and was used by ad-blockers to keep ads from appearing on conservative and libertarian web sites, defines “disinformation” to include “narratives” deemed adverse to “at-risk groups”, even when no false claim is made. That includes stating true facts that depict minority groups in an unflattering light. When a Haitian-American lawyer accurately noted that the crime rate is higher among his fellow blacks than among whites, his blog post “Jailing Violent Criminals Is Appropriate,” was labeled by the Global Disinformation Index as “white supremacy content” that advertising should not appear next to. His blog post was branded as hateful, even though it accurately cited federal crime statistics and accurately described a Supreme Court ruling noting that crime rates are indeed different for blacks and whites.
The Global Disinformation Index gave its worst ratings to ten publications, eight of which were conservative, and none of which were left-of-center. One of the ten was libertarian, Reason Magazine, which has won journalism awards for its reporting on civil-liberties violations and government abuses of power. As syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum notes, “NewsGuard, a service that rates adherence to basic principles of good journalism,” gives “Reason magazine, its highest possible score. Yet the Global Disinformation Index, a British organization that aims to steer advertisers away from disreputable websites, claims Reason is one of the 10 ‘riskiest’ online news sources in the United States.”
By contrast, GDI gave high ratings to left-wing click-bait publications such as HuffPost that frequently make false claims and engage in slanted, sensationalistic coverage. GDI’s co-founder, Clare Melford, wrote for HuffPost in the past. GDI claimed that “HuffPost largely featured fact-based, unbiased content free from sensational text or visuals. This domain also refrained from perpetuating divisive narratives…” GDI has nothing bad to say about left-wing news outlets that have committed libel or journalistic hoaxes, such as Rolling Stone, which peddled a gang rape hoax and had to pay $1.65 million to settle a defamation lawsuit against it.
