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Comment by _euac | Hacker News Reader

See, the best trick for pushing propaganda isn't fabricating stories, but choosing carefully what stories you publish and which ones you don't.

The perfect example of that is Breitbart's infamous 'black crime' tag: Breitbart didn't need to invent stories, they'd just go and pick up out of the bunch of criminal prosecutions happening every single day in a country with >300 million inhabitants. But by choosing to focus on crimes committed by black people - and conveniently leaving out similar crimes committed by your average white criminal - it reaffirmed on their readers their 'intuition' that black people are clearly more inclined to commit crime.

So, you should always consider who is publishing a story and why.

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It's true, although obviously it applies to the both sides. In fact, BLM protests were caused by exactly the same mechanism you're describing - liberal media was creating false narratives about police brutality towards black people.

"Transgender murder epidemic" is an even better example, it was completely made up by the media. Look up the numbers and compare them with the general population.

Sorry that goes against the every-day experience of black people in the USA; one of the reasons so many people got on the streets.

Cite?

For starters:

[1] https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-frisk-data

[2] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/10/12/policing/

And [1] is in ostensibly "liberal" New York city.

For many people, the idea that black people don't commit crimes at a higher rate than others goes against their every-day experience in the USA.

Maybe your response is ironic: I genuinely can't tell. But clearly "my every-day experience justifies my actions regardless of the facts about (my view)" is not a fair rebuttal, because anyone can make that claim about anything.

Nope, and nope. Neither is true, and both are propaganda.

The difference is that the criminal justice system is supposed to address every single case. Any individual case of a public prosecutor refusing to prosecute a murderer (because they're also employed as a cop) is an injustice at the scale of the entire jurisdiction. Statistics on the race of the victims aren't actually necessary to get outraged. So your argument, at best, applies to the political framing of the subject rather than the core issue.

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