In an all-too-rare move by media nowadays, the Dallas Morning News published an article in which editor Mike Wilson admitted that the paper misled the public by uncritically repeating a false statistic about guns in America.
Wilson says that he was alerted by a reader that a figure featured in a Washington Post article and subsequently repeated by the Dallas Morning News could not possibly be correct—namely, that “4.2 percent of children aged 0 to 17 in the United States have witnessed a shooting in the past year.”
A fact-checking inquiry revealed that the original study actually asked whether children had been “in any place in real life where (they) could see or hear people being shot, bombs going off, or street riots?”—yielding an answer of 4 percent. It was a report by a combined research team from the University of Texas and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that changed the wording—and raised the number to 4.2 percent!
That’s right: The CDC is still publishing false statistics about guns to boost its agenda. Remind us again why we need to be funding such “research” with taxpayer money?
Anyway, kudos to the Dallas Morning News for owning up to getting suckered.
