Sep
15

MSM Link Trump Rallies to Hate Crimes, Then Ignore Correction

Those who dislike or despise President Trump are fond of blaming his “inflammatory rhetoric” for the violence committed by others, from the local racist jerk to terrorists and psychopaths. In fact, they were seemingly justified in these accusations, thanks to a study conducted by three professors at the University of North Texas and Texas A&M.

Published this past Spring (and reported in the Washington Post), the Texas study showed that Trump campaign rallies resulted in more than double — i.e., 226% increase in — the usual number of hate crimes in the counties that hosted them. The anti-Trumpers loved this, of course, and everyone from the San Francisco Chronicle to Vox to CNN reported on it. However, it now appears that the Texas team may have rushed to press before they should have, likely without independent confirmation.

A pair of Ph.D. students in economics at Harvard University decided to try replicating the study’s results. As reported in a Reason.com article earlier this month, they re-collected the same data and applied the same analysis as the original study.

“Wherever possible, we copied the decisions that are mentioned in the original paper. Our headline results were very close to those reported in the original paper…. Using additional data we collected, we also analyzed the effect of Hillary Clinton’s campaign rallies using the identical statistical framework. The ostensible finding: Clinton rallies contribute to an even greater increase in hate incidents than Trump rallies.” (italics added)

Well, ain’t that a kick in the seat!

This prompted the Harvard team to look more closely at the methodology, and they uncovered a problem.

“Both of these results rely on comparing counties with rallies to other counties without them. This produces a glaring problem. Politicians tend to hold political rallies near where large numbers of people live. And in places with more people, the raw number of crimes is generally mechanically higher. Simply put, no one should be surprised that Orange County, California (population 3.19 million) was home to both more reported hate incidents (5) and Trump rallies (2) than Orange County, Indiana (population 19,840, which had zero of each).

Nor is it sensible to interpret that one of these differences (hate crimes) is caused by the other (political rallies). Indeed, adding a simple statistical control for county population to the original analysis causes the estimated effect of Trump rallies on reported hate incidents to become statistically indistinguishable from zero. The study is wrong, and yet journalists ran with it anyway.” (italics added)

You might think that the press would jump on this. But, when The Daily Signal‘s piece by Peter Hasson went to press (9/12), only the Business Insider had yet acknowledged the proposed correction to the anti-Trump study. Meanwhile, the Post is passing the buck to the guy that runs their academic blog.

Not surprisingly, the authors of the original study are contesting the results of the Harvard team’s study. In essence, they insist that they accounted for the relevant variables and that the Harvard team’s conclusions/analysis was itself flawed. So, this matter is sure to be the subject of controversy for a while longer. Let’s just hope that truth and professional integrity win out.

At the very least, this seems to show not only how quickly certain members of the MSM will jump on any story that makes Trump and his supporters look bad, but also how reluctant they are to retract when it turns out to be false. It may also reveal an example of academics letting their own biases get the better of them. The Harvard team had a few things to say about this:

“The hypotheses that researchers choose to test often reflect their beliefs, and when initial statistical findings do not match the researcher’s gut intuition, it is easy to tweak these choices until the analysis ‘works.’ By comparison, when a result ‘feels right,’ it is easy to conclude the analysis with minimal further checks. In short, falling prey to confirmation bias is easy. Attempting to find errors in a result that, deep down, you want to be true, is hard. Furthermore, the ideological imbalance of academia—where liberals outnumber conservatives six to one—can worsen this. While claims deemed conservative may receive much scrutiny, those that comport with liberal sensibilities are more likely to go unscrutinized.

In principle, this need not have much impact outside academia. A neutral press, acting as a gatekeeper, need not report unquestioningly about every unpublished study. However, like academics, journalists as a profession are overwhelmingly liberal, with four times as many reporters identifying as Democrats than as Republicans. Given how little scrutiny was required to reveal the flaws in the thesis that Trump rallies cause hate incidents, one cannot help but wonder whether its viral status was aided by journalists predisposed to believe its message.”