By The Signal Editorial Board
Statistics lie, and liars use statistics.
In the presidential debate on Sept. 10, ABC News fact-checked Former President Donald Trump incessantly – and gave Vice President Kamala Harris a free pass.
If you thought the debate appeared to be three against one, that’s because it was. In several instances, it would even be dubious to call the disgraceful actions of the ABC News moderators “fact checking,” because the so-called “fact checking” was frequently, itself, factually incorrect.
After the fact, moderator Linsey Davis even admitted that she and her colleagues at ABC had tilted the scales against Trump, planning ahead to “fact check” the former president and not to do so against Harris, who told plenty of whoppers of her own during the debate, but skated through with nary a challenge from the friendly moderators of ABC News.
That the self-admitted bias on the part of ABC was celebrated by many of the news outlets reporting it is a condemnation of what “journalism” has become.
During the debate Harris had no plan, and she offered up no policies. She did, however, offer up lots of happy talk and reminiscences about her upbringing, while dodging anything resembling a direct answer to a direct question. Further, the questions lobbed her way were softballs, in contrast to the “gotcha” questions fired at Trump.
Harris has continually said she has a plan, without providing specifics. An “opportunity economy” makes for a nice sound bite – but ask Harris to elaborate on what, exactly, that really means, and she will ignore the question and spin a nice home-spun yarn about her childhood.
In 2020 President Joe Biden continued to say he had a plan to fix COVID-19. He had no plan. He got elected and then just banged the drum for vaccination, taking the credit every step of the way – using a vaccine that the Trump administration developed and cut the red tape to get it in the hands of people in record time.
During the Sept. 10 debate Trump said crime was up over the last few years. This is something that anyone paying attention would know. But this was immediately “fact checked” by ABC’s David Muir.
He said the FBI released statistics that say crime was actually down. Trump tried to say that’s not true, but got cut off.
Trump said the report was fake and it is. Muir knew that the FBI report did not include key American cities, including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
So of course, crime would be lower. You can’t leave off the most crime-ridden cities in America and compare it to a report that includes those cities.
The completely dishonest and fake report was released by the FBI just before the Trump-Biden debate. It was used by Biden, but the June debate was so bad for Biden it got lost in the shuffle of his incoherence and didn’t garner much attention.
So now Harris and Muir used the fake report.
The Independent wrote of the report that “data informing the FBI’s figures is supplied voluntarily by law enforcement agencies across the U.S., and do not include major metropolitan areas including Los Angeles and New York, where crime is historically high. The LAPD and NYPD are the two largest police forces in the nation, but they are not included in the FBI data, which could have changed the data if it had been included.”
This fake report sounds just like the 51 ex-intelligent officers signing a letter in 2020 saying Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation. We all know that was also untrue. That letter was released just before the debate in 2020 to help Biden, while the social media tech giants suppressed the truth in order to help Biden get elected.
In the 2024 campaign, Democrats are using their same old playbook of lying and disinformation. And most of the mainstream media is all too happy in its complicity. Look no further than ABC News for an example.
Ask yourself, was crime lower three and a half years ago?
Was the economy better three and a half years ago?
Were you better off three and a half years ago?
The answers are, of course, no.
