Better in their words…

Try the New York Times. In a front-page news story published just before the 2012 presidential election, the Times cast grave doubt on the reliability of widespread mail-in voting, noting it was much more vulnerable to fraud than conventional voting.

“While fraud in voting by mail is far less common than innocent errors, it is vastly more prevalent than . . . in-person voting fraud”

Times change. Last month the paper ran a headline that said, “Trump Is Pushing a False Argument on Vote-by-Mail Fraud.”

It’s possible, I suppose, that all that fraud the paper worried about has just disappeared in eight years. But the real clue as to why the Times—along with virtually the entire media—now says claims about mail-in fraud are false comes further down in that October 2012 news item.

“Republicans are in fact more likely than Democrats to vote absentee. In the 2008 general election in Florida, 47 percent of absentee voters were Republicans and 36 percent were Democrats.”

There you have it. When voting by mail seemed to be a Republican thing it was: Fraud! Manipulation! Now that Democrats are expected to vote this way in much greater numbers, it’s all: Nothing to see here.

Liberals in the media and the political establishment used to poke fun at conservatives who supposedly ignored evidence, data and facts on things like climate change. But we all knew the media simply chose the facts that suited its own narrative and picked another set when they were no longer convenient. Now it’s transparent.

To the Mail-In Mirage in the past month we can add the Sturgis Motorpsycho Nightmare and the 93% Peaceful Riot in the category of selective, tendentious and downright fraudulent data selection by the people who control much of our national discourse.

You’ll recall that researchers at something called the IZA Institute of Labor Economics recently “discovered” that the rally in South Dakota last month, which attracted the usual massive crowd of bikers from across the country, was responsible for more than 260,000 cases of Covid-19 across the country. Various news organizations seized on the report as yet more evidence of the irredeemable stupidity, arrogance and disdain for science of your typical (presumably white, Trump-supporting) biker.

Those same news organizations had looked on in awed reverence as millions of Americans rallied all summer in support of Black Lives Matter with nary a mention of any risk of coronavirus transmission.

Conservatives are sometimes mocked for a faith-based approach to science in matters such as intelligent design. But from a scientific perspective, much of the media’s performance over the Sturgis-BLM contrast was straight out of Exodus. It was as if God’s chosen people, the protesters, had been spared death through the modern-day equivalent of daubing sheep’s blood on their doors, sporting a BLM bandanna perhaps, while their evil motorbike-riding oppressors had been struck down by God’s wrath.

The Sturgis research in fact didn’t withstand a moment’s scrutiny but the larger lesson was delivered: Only adherence to the faith will save you.

Then there was another report last month that found 93% of the BLM protests over the summer were “peaceful.” The report by an organization called US in Crisis (there’s a clue somewhere in the name, if you look hard enough), was taken by most of the media as proof that their claims of “mostly peaceful” protests were correct. Only a small minority had been marred by violence.

Now, 93% sounds like a big number. If your child got that on a math test, you’d be glowing with pride. But there are other contexts. If we avoided getting hit by a car only 93% of the times we crossed the road, most of us wouldn’t make it to our fifth birthday.

And of course 93% is a much smaller percentage than 99.9%. Or, shall we say 7% is a much larger percentage than 0.1%—which is the proportion of black homicide victims last year who were unarmed and killed by police. And yet we are told by the media that the latter number represents a culture of systemic police brutality, or, in the words of Naomi Osaka, the newly crowned U.S. Open women’s tennis champion, the “continued genocide of black people.”

But who needs things like evidence and data when there’s a story to promote?