Is It True That 'Getting Killed by Police Is a Leading Cause of Death for Young Black Men,' as the LA Times Claims?

[Geee]

PJ Media

Centuries from now, when archaeologists unearth the long-buried cities of the United States of America, they may find artifacts of what by then will be the forgotten craft of journalism. Just as we look today at the medical practices of antiquity and wonder how our forebears could have been so backward, those archaeologists of the future will marvel, as they sift through a newly unearthed newsroom amid the ruins New York, Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles, that American journalists were once burdened by such quaint notions as objectivity, fairness, and devotion to the truth. “Imagine,” they will say, “being so primitive as to present a news story without an agenda.”

Maybe some future historian, upon being presented with these archaeological discoveries, will draw the connection between the decline of American journalism and that of the country itself. And maybe that historian will look at a recent story in the Los Angeles Times as a luminous example of that very decline.

 refer you to the August 16 story that ran under the headline “Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America.” As is the intent, the headline is an attention-grabber. “My goodness,” the reader is expected to say, “those young black men must be getting a pretty raw deal from the police these days.” Most readers of course will not delve beyond the headline, but even those who do will not encounter anything resembling journalism as it was once practiced. Rather, they’ll find more than 1,400 words devoted to the racial-grievance agenda that drives so much of what appears in the Los Angeles Times.

And worse, not only is journalism itself perverted with the story, but so is science, for the story is presented as such on the page and was written by Amina Khan, who is billed on the paper’s website as a “science writer.” So, if you dare to quibble with any of the story’s details, or heaven forbid question its very premise, it makes you a “denier,” one to be cast out into the darkness with climate-change skeptics, believers in sex differences, and all the other benighted deplorables who are so sneered upon among our sophisticated betters in the media.