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Sean Hannity, "knockout game" truther.

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I remember the summer of 2011, a story about a crowd of teenagers at the Wisconsin State Fair randomly attacking fairgoers went viral as a sign of a burgeoning race war. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel fanned the flames, calling the teenagers"rampaging youths" who caused "mob-like disturbances":

"Dozens to hundreds"? When witnesses can't differentiate between 24 and 100, should we really rely on them to speculate whether a crime was racially motivated?One of the reasons the story gained so much traction could have stemmed from the fact that Milwaukee is the most segregated city in the country, and it validated white residents' fear that their black neighbors are dangerous.

Now, the false trend story of black mob violence has cropped up again, as it seems to do annually, in conservative media outlets. (McKay Coppinswrote about this phenomenonin BuzzFeed last year.) The new scare is the "knockout game," in which black youths supposedly attack innocent people just for fun. Conservative pundits decry the MSM for suffering from political correctness and whitewashing crimes perpetrated by black people, but amore reasonable explanation for why most media outlets aren't devoting round-the-clock coverage to the knockout game is thatsorry, Sean Hannitythere is no hard data showing that it's a trend.

An important clarification: the gamedefinitely exists, and has been around for at least a couple of years. I'm not claiming the game doesn't exist. But the idea that it's reached epidemic levels, or that it's only being played by young black people, is a fallacy. As Alan Noble convincingly writes, "Analyzing data is not as simple as watching some YouTube videos and Googling 'knockout game.'" And when it comes to the knockout game's supposed popularity, the data is almost entirely anecdotal:

This is precisely the type of story meant to animate the deepest recesses of our lizard brains"Danger lurks around every corner! Identify your enemy!"At the epicenter of this narrative is Colin Flaherty, a writer for WorldNetDaily who probably has a Google alert set up for "black suspect." He's made it his life's work to report any single crime perpetrated by a black person in the U.S. against a white person. In a recent blog post, he lists as evidence six separate crimes in Philadelphia over the course of two years, which share nothing in similarity except for the fact that they involved black people.

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Imagine if another national "journalist" started doing the same for, say, any crime committed in Alabama, or any arson charge in the country. More...

Imagine if another national "journalist" started doing the same for, say, any crime committed in Alabama, or any arson charge in the country. People would start to think Alabama was going through a crime epidemic, or that arson was becoming all the rage with criminals. That would be ridiculous, because it's ridiculous to assume that a few unrelated counts of arson make arson an epidemic. But when you inject race into the equation, it conveniently aligns with the assumptions of people who happen to be racist.That's the sort of twisted logic that justifies why more than half of the U.S. prison population is made up by black and Hispanic people, even though they comprise a quarter of the total population.

See the original post:
Why the "Knockout Game" trend is a myth. - Slate Magazine