The Year in Exaggeration

Correcting the record on democracy’s death, nasty railroads, killer hurricanes, etc.

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.. Excerpts:

"Reverse hysteria helped to obscure another important story. Police killings of blacks, while gaining saturation coverage, actually are a smaller share of all black homicides than for other racial groups. That share likely got even smaller in 2022 for a horrifying reason: an increase in black homicides overall. One study found that while gun homicides of white males remained flat at roughly 3 per 100,000, they jumped an astonishing 60% for black males in the previous two years, to 56 per 100,000.

This phenomenon, apparently related to a crisis in black-police relations after the George Floyd murder, goes unmentioned by many for whom putatively “black lives matter.”

Joe Biden intervened in 2022 to prevent as disastrous rail strike not because railroads insist on denying their workers sick days. As USA Today almost alone pointed out, railroads actually were leaders in a national “trend toward giving employees a bank of paid days off, that can be used for any purpose,” so workers don’t have to “lie about or prove illness to take a sick day.”

Perhaps the most misleading moment was a front-page Washington Post story about a rail worker who cancelled a doctor’s appointment for an unspecified symptom and died of a heart attack an unspecified number of weeks later.

The Post didn’t explain whether the symptom was related to the heart attack, how many weeks had elapsed, whether the worker had a known condition, why he didn’t reschedule the appointment, why he didn’t use any of his contractual days off or replenishable “points” under a company system that allowed him to reject a work assignment on short notice for any reason."

"In a tweet thread, Patrick Brown, an atmospheric scientist at the climate-action-supporting Breakthrough Institute, wondered why, apart from increased rainfall, the news media “insist on a framing that misleads its audience into thinking we have experienced a dramatic change in hurricane frequency/intensity?”

Ollie Wing, a University of Bristol hydrologist, wondered in a tweet why the media publishes exaggerated flood maps to suggest centimeters of sea-level rise will result in meter-deep floods. The maps are based on so-called bare earth digital overlays that ignore natural and artificial flood barriers, including trees and other vegetation, which in any climate act to limit flooding.

Mr. Wing’s own recently published study indicates that expected increases in U.S. flooding losses in the next 30 years will be primarily due to increased development, not climate change.

The year that ended saw the expressions “existential” and “climate crisis” become conjoined twins in the press. Yet a reader searched in vain for any mention that a long-awaited report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reduced its estimated path of future emissions and also judged the climate to be less prone to worst-case warming than previously thought."