Dan Abrams rips NY Times report on police killings

Mediaite founder Dan Abrams excoriated The New York Times this week for fearmongering once again about police shootings.

To hear the Times tell it, cops have been indiscriminately killing innocent people left and right since the deadly Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.

“[F]ive years later, despite the largest racial justice protests since the civil rights era of the 1960s and a wave of measures to improve training and hold officers more accountable, the number of people killed by the police continues to rise each year, and [b]lack Americans still die in disproportionate numbers,” the Times reported last week.

The title of the piece was equally ominous: “Since George Floyd’s Murder, Police Killings Keep Rising, Not Falling.”

There was just one problem, according to Abrams.

Listen:

When “you read the article,” he said in the clip above, you discover that “the headline is totally, totally misleading.”

As proof, he dug deep into the article — past the headline and introductory paragraphs — and found this nearly hidden gem:

“Last year, the police killed at least 1,226 people, an 18 percent increase over 2019, the year before Mr. Floyd was killed. …The vast majority of such cases have been shootings, and the vast majority of the people killed were reported to be armed.”

See the problem?

“But wait — they were armed?!” Abrams asked in shock. “Doesn’t that change the story a little bit?”

It changes it a lot, in fact — which the so-called “report” from the Times only admitted toward the end: “Even as police killings have risen in the years since the killing of Mr. Floyd, killings of unarmed people have become less frequent.”

Well, well, well …

“Why isn’t that the headline?!” Abrams angrily asked, adding that this sentence near the bottom of the article contained the “actual data.”

“So the killing of unarmed people by police goes from 152 to 53, and the headline is more people are being killed by police?” he continued.

It made no sense.

The real number of unarmed black people killed by police you can share with your liberal friends https://t.co/eOxSdCwGLN pic.twitter.com/JvbQvDv13c

— BPR (@BIZPACReview) April 23, 2021

Abrams added that a scenario where an “armed” suspect is “pointing [a weapon] at the police” is entirely different from a scenario where an unarmed suspect is just running away or whatever.

“Most of the time, it’s not going to be the fault of the police officer, if someone is resisting in any way with a weapon,” he explained. “The premise that they have been using to sell this story doesn’t really work.”

He then burst out laughing as he read from the report about how experts were “split on why the drop may have occurred and how much weight to give the data.”

“This is real — it’s in The New York Times, how much weight to give the data,” Abrams noted. “Why are you doing the story then?”

Concluding his remarks, he called the report “stunningly misleading,” which was no surprise, of course, given that the report was published by The New York Times.

The Times has long been mired in blatant left-wing bias. The Times’ then-executive editor, Dean Baquet, famously held a town hall with staff members in 2019 during which he admitted that the paper’s core mission had become #OrangeManBad.

New York Times reportedly held pow-wow on narrative shift after ‘Russia collusion’ died https://t.co/oa9RGqzJza

— BPR (@BIZPACReview) August 16, 2019

“We built our newsroom to cover one story, and we did it truly well,” Baquet said, according to a transcript provided by Slate. “Now we have to regroup, and shift resources and emphasis to take on a different story.”

The “one story” that the Times had originally centered its coverage on was the now-debunked Russian collusion delusion conspiracy theory.

“Chapter 1 of the story of Donald Trump, not only for our newsroom but, frankly, for our readers, was: Did Donald Trump have untoward relationships with the Russians, and was there obstruction of justice?” he said. “That was a really hard story, by the way, let’s not forget that. We set ourselves up to cover that story. I’m going to say it. We won two Pulitzer Prizes covering that story. And I think we covered that story better than anybody else.”

But this narrative changed after former special counsel Robert Mueller testified to Congress.

“The day Bob Mueller walked off that witness stand, two things happened,” Baquet continued. “Our readers who want Donald Trump to go away suddenly thought, ‘Holy sh*t, Bob Mueller is not going to do it.’ And Donald Trump got a little emboldened politically, I think. Because, you know, for obvious reasons. And I think that the story changed. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about started to emerge like six or seven weeks ago. We’re a little tiny bit flat-footed. I mean, that’s what happens when a story looks a certain way for two years. Right?”

And so, after years of using a debunked conspiracy theory to try to cater to those “who want Donald Trump to go away,” the Times had chosen a new narrative to sell. And that narrative was that the then-president (who’s since been reelected to office) was racist — and of course bad.

Senior Staff Writer
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V. Saxena is a staff writer for BizPac Review with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University.

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