A Republican liar claims “the post-George Floyd riots resulted in excess of over 15,000 black male deaths in this country.” It’s not remotely true.
Ryan Gidursky, a rightwing activist (see his website here), made that assertion on a CNN talk show on Tuesday, October 15, 2024 (read story here). The host, Abby Phillips, didn’t let him get away with it.
Gidursky based his claim of “15,000 deaths” (at the 5:10 mark in the video below) on the so-called “Ferguson effect,” which The Atlantic described (here) as “the idea that increased scrutiny of police following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri has led to an increased murder rate in major US cities.” The Atlantic debunked that argument by pointing out that several studies failed to link higher crime to loss of confidence in the police.
Phillips must be aware of this, because she challenged this lack of connection. She interrupted Gidursky and said, “You cannot just invent a connection between two things, just because you want that connection to be there.”
Gidursky also mischaracterized the protests in response to George Floyd’s murder by a white police officer as “riots.” I addressed this smear in August 2020, in a posting on this blog here. As I wrote then, of more then 11,000 demonstrations and protests, 96% were entirely peaceful, and the police and rightwing counterprotesters and vigilantes were overwhelmingly responsible for such violence as did occur.
He wasn’t the only liar on the program. Abel Maldonado, a GOP politician from California, asserted “the border was sealed” while Trump was president (at 3:20 in the video). But the chart here shows the number of illegal border crossings remained steady from 2010 through 2018, then rose sharply in 2019, the third year of Trump’s presidency and the year before the pandemic.
Politicians have always exaggerated, and used facts selectively, but now those on the right are outright lying and making things up. For many years, journalists were passive observers, practicing a form of “he said, she said” journalism; but as the frequency and intensity of lying has increased, they’ve begun to intervene.
They should. Whether it’s a newspaper or TV show, it’s their platform, and they have every right to not allow liars to mislead the journalists’ audiences. They also have a responsibility to truth and factual accuracy, which may require pushing back against lies and falsehoods.
The vitality and success of democracy depend on an informed public; the media and journalists play a vital role in this; and voters have a right to know when political figures are lying. Calling out falsehoods, as Phillips did in this segment, is part of a journalist’s job.
Photo above: The police murder of George Floyd sparked huge demonstrations across America, which were overwhelmingly peaceful