Erick-Woods Erickson
I can’t wait for the show notes.
The FBI has stealth-edited its crime stats for 2022.
You know how all the reporters in America on TV and in newspapers have been dismissive of conservative concerns about crime? Philip Bump in the Washington Post relied on the FBI data to tell people Fox News was lying to them about crime.
Well, well, well — it turns out crime did go up.
The FBI has revised its 2022 data for inclusion in its 2023 report. Violent crime increased over 4% in 2022. Will the news media correct the record?
This comes after the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised annual job growth to cut almost 1 million jobs from the data.
Does the American press corps care about these revisions or only when a Republican controls the White House?
Considering the FBI made the edit without telling anyone, it sure seems that if the original data reporting was a mistake, the quiet revision was intentional.
Long-time readers and listeners know that I expect the data to be revised. This complicated process often depends on legally required census surveys of business owners for jobs and cooperation by local governments for crime statistics.
But the pattern here is remarkable: Every single month, the economic data is reported as brilliant only to be revised the next month. And now, the same pattern exists with crime data.
And, as every journalist reading this knows, the corrections always get less coverage than the original headline.
So, for the journalists, are you being played, or are you playing along? Because this pattern from the Biden Administration now stretches across departments.
