Fired For Telling The Truth
Zac Kriegman and the credibility of Reuters.
Reuters is considered to be one of the most objective news sources in the Mainstream Media. Longer-form newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have a flowery, literary style. Reuters, like the Associated Press purports to be just the facts.
In 2020 Reuters, like many other Mainstream news organizations, reported dishonestly on the Black Lives Matter movement. The company’s director of data science, Zac Kriegman, grew increasingly disturbed by the organization’s reporting. As he later wrote in The Free Press:
For many months I stayed silent. I continued to read Reuters’ reporting on the movement, and started to see how the company’s misguided worldview about policing and racism was distorting the way we were reporting news stories to the public.
In one story, Reuters reported on police in Kenosha, Wisconsin shooting a black man, Jacob Blake, in the back—but failed to mention that they did so only after he grabbed a knife and looked likely to lunge at them.
In another story, Reuters referred “to a wave of killings of African-Americans by police using unjustified lethal force,” despite a lack of statistical evidence that such a wave of police killings had taken place. (In 2020, 18 unarmed black Americans were killed by police, according to The Washington Post database.)
And in yet another, Reuters referred to the shooting of Michael Brown as one of a number of “egregious examples of lethal police violence,” despite the fact that an investigation conducted by the Justice Department—then run by Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder—had cleared the police officer in question of all wrongdoing.
A pattern was starting to emerge: Reporters and editors would omit key details that undermined the BLM narrative. More important than reporting accurately was upholding—nurturing—that storyline.
At some point, the organization went from ignoring key facts to just reporting lies. When Donald Trump declared, in July 2020, that the police kill more white than black people—this is true—Reuters, in its dispatch, repeated the false claim that blacks “are shot at a disproportionate rate.” In December 2020, Reuters reported that black Americans “are more likely to be killed by police,” citing a 2019 National Academy of Sciences study that, our reporters claimed, found that black men were 2.5 times likelier than white men to be killed by police. In fact, the only rigorous study to examine the likelihood of police use of force—Roland Fryer’s—found that police, as mentioned, were less likely to use lethal force against black Americans.
All this left me deeply unsettled: It was bad for Reuters, which was supposed to be objective and withhold judgment. It was bad for our readers, who were being misinformed…
Kriegman took a two month leave of absence to analyze the data for himself. He wrote a long post on Reuters’ internal message board explaining the extensive research which shows that controlling for the rates at which different racial groups are involved in the murder of police officers, black people are not any more likely than white people to be shot by police officers. Furthermore, the Black Lives Matter movement caused many police departments to withdraw from higher-crime black neighborhoods which caused an increase in the murder rate in those neighborhoods.
The tone with which some Reuters employees responded to Kriegman was hysterical. One employee wrote:
“I do not believe that there is any point in trying to engage in a blow-by-blow refutation of your argument, and I will not do so. My unwillingness to do so doesn't signal the strength of your argument. If someone says, ‘The KKK did lots of good things for the community—prove me wrong,’ I'm not obligated to do so.”
As far as we know that person is still employed at Reuters. Another wrote:
“As a white person I am embarrassed and ashamed for you. We, as white folks, should NEVER presume to speak for people of color—which is what you’ve chosen to do,”
That person is also still employed at Reuters according to her LinkedIn.
Reuters fired Kriegman.
Non-Mainstream outlets reported on Kriegman’s firing. These stories took a human interest tone (e.g. The Free Press and City Journal) or a ‘woke libs gone mad’ tone (e.g. The Daily Mail). I didn’t see enough commentary on the deeper conclusion which we should draw from this story: Reuters’ is a news outlet where reporters print false and misleading things, the company’s own data scientists point out that those things are false and misleading, and then the company fires the data scientists. This seriously diminishes the credibility of Reuters. Now that you know the Reuters-Kriegman story, you should have a lot less trust in Reuters’ reporting than you did before.
Some people want to acknowledge that Reuters behaved terribly on the BLM issue and in the Kriegman case, but then trust Reuters’ reporting on every other issue. That reaction makes no sense at all. If you learn that someone is lying to you about one subject, then you should conclude that they’re probably lying to you about other subjects as well.
Suppose you were born into the Church of Cosmetology. One day, a data scientist presents evidence that some of the things that the Church of Cosmetology has been saying are not true. Your fellow church members ridicule the data scientist, suggest that they only reason he’s interested in this data is because he must be a very evil man, compare him to a KKK member, and kick him out of the church. If that happened, you should start to doubt the church’s teachings in general, not just the specific teaching that the data scientist criticized.
People who trust the Mainstream Media are in a cult, like the Scientologists or the Moonies. They will admit to isolated errors, but they have a psychological block which prevents them from even considering that the authority figures they trust might be systematically wrong.
The problem is not isolated to the race and crime issue. If Reuters is the kind of place where data scientists are fired for pointing out flaws in the company’s reporting, then Reuters is not the kind of place that is conducive to discovering true things. An anti-truth climate is likely to affect its reporting on many issues, not just the race and crime issue.
Imagine if Breitbart News had a data scientist who pointed out that their reporting was inaccurate and misleading, and then the employees threw a tantrum over it and the company fired him. Would any liberal fail to understand that that incident would demolish Breitbart’s credibility? If you would understand it for Breitbart News you should understand it for Reuters.
Many smart and reflective people believe that the Mainstream Media is a credible source of information. They are simply wrong. The average employee at Reuters probably has a higher IQ than the average employee at Breitbart, but the Reuters people are so dishonest and so cultish that they just can’t produce reliably accurate information. The person who consumes no news at all will get a more accurate impression of American life than the person who reads only the Mainstream Media.
Happily, we live in an era with thousands of blogs and websites, so we don’t have to choose between Mainstream Media or nothing. If you’re interested in science, you can get far more accurate information from Aporia magazine than the New York Times. American Renaissance covers race and crime issues more honestly than any Mainstream Media outlet. Zac Kriegman has his own Substack now so you can read his work directly.
You don’t hate the media enough.
This phenomenon has a name: "Gell-Mann Amnesia". When you hear the media reporting on something you know about, and know the media is wrong, but then immediately forget that dissonance and trust the media when they report on something you don't know about.