Omissions, Damned Omissions and Hate Crimes Report
Washington Post coverage of the FBI’s release of its annual report on hate crimes recalled the phrase attributed, perhaps incorrectly, to Benjamin Disraeli: There are “lies, damned lies and statistics.”
The Post reported the FBI figures in a brief, “Crime: More reports of hate offenses against gays, religious groups” in the newspaper’s November 24 national Digest. “Reports of hate crimes against gays and religious groups increased sharply in 2008 ….” the item said. But The Post provided only percentages, not the actual number of incidents. Readers could not determine how significant the increases were, or what religious groups were most affected.
USA Today’s article “FBI report shows more hate-motivated crime” was more specific and informative. Crimes against blacks and members of religious groups “accounted for 56 percent of the 7,783 hate crimes reported in 2008,” the paper noted. Like The Post, USA Today reported that this was a two percent increase over 2007’s total.
“The number of attacks on blacks increased eight percent to 2,876, accounting for seven of every 10 race-motivated crimes,” USA Today said. “Hate crimes based on religion rose nine percent to 1,519. Most, 67 percent, were against Jews.”
The Washington Times covered the FBI report as a seven-paragraph item in its “Hot Button/CULTURE etc.” column. Like USA Today, it used more specific percentages, noting for example that “16.7 percent [of 2008’s reported hate crimes] were motivated on the basis of an anti-homosexual or anti-bisexual bias” and “11.5 percent by an ethnic bias, mostly directed against Hispanics ….”
The Forward, a nationally-circulated Jewish weekly, put the religious bias crimes in perspective in a full-length November 25 article, “What’s Behind the FBI’s Hate Crime Report?” By far the largest number, 1,013 of the 1,519 total, were committed against Jews. There were 105 reported anti-Muslim hate crimes.
These statistics suggest that:
1) If the FBI statistics are newsworthy enough to warrant mention, maybe they deserve a full story, and
2) News media ought to scrutinize allegations of an “Islamophobic backlash” made repeatedly after the Sept. 11, 2001 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks by the Council on American Islamic Relations and other “Wahhabi lobby” groups.
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