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Commentary By Jason L. Riley

The Media Wanted to Believe Jussie Smollett

Culture Race

Victims of gun violence in Chicago get almost no coverage, while his tale got hours and hours.

American society has been getting more tolerant for decades. Polling shows that we are less sexist, less racist, less homophobic than ever. This progress is evident in workplaces, schools, housing patterns and personal relationships. All-white neighborhoods are effectively extinct. More than two-thirds of Americans support same-sex marriage. A massacre at a gay nightclub or a black church is not a sign of the times but a tragic deviation from what is now the norm.

Jussie Smollett’s story about being attacked in Chicago by two white men armed with bleach and a noose always seemed suspect. Most people don’t recognize an America today in which that sort of thing happens. Mr. Smollett now stands accused of fabricating the incident to advance his acting career, which makes much more sense in the current political environment.

A vocal opponent of President Trump, Mr. Smollett is a card-carrying member of the progressive “resistance,” and progressives are one of the few factions who remain in denial about America’s social advancement over the past half-century. Because Mr. Trump prevailed in 2016 despite his retrograde remarks about women, immigrants and minorities, liberal Democrats insist that little has changed since the Eisenhower administration. The irony is that if the country were still as bigoted as the left claims, people like Mr. Smollett wouldn’t have to resort to tall tales to gain attention.

At his press conference last week, Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson could barely contain his anger at Mr. Smollett for wasting police resources and needlessly stoking racial tensions in a city that’s had more than its fair share in recent years. Mr. Smollett “took advantage of the pain and anger of racism to promote his career,” he said. “Bogus police reports cause real harm. They do harm to every legitimate victim who’s in need of support by police and investigators as well as the citizens of this city.”

The superintendent also had some choice words for the press, who were taken in by this “publicity stunt” and seem eager to believe a progressive narrative at odds with reality. “I just wish that the families of gun violence in this city got this much attention,” said Mr. Johnson, later adding that “I only hope that the truth about what happened receives the same amount of attention that the hoax did.”

He can hope, but the safer bet is that the mainstream media will continue to take dictation from progressives and liberals who have little use for facts and evidence that don’t advance their political narrative. Mr. Johnson, like so many other big-city police chiefs, has the thankless task of trying to keep the public safe in a political environment that has deemed police the biggest threat to public safety.

The victims of gun violence don’t receive the attention they deserve because they don’t advance the left’s political agenda. Social-justice activists don’t raise money and stay relevant by focusing on the black victims of black violent criminals. Politicians don’t win elections by explaining to voters that the police are focused on poor black communities because that’s where the 911 calls originate. If Jussie Smollett “took advantage of the pain and anger of racism to promote his career,” he was merely following the lead of so many racial spokesmen and liberal politicians over the decades who have conspired to turn a vaunted civil-rights movement into a seamy racket.

Homicides in Chicago fell for the second straight year in 2018 but still exceeded those of New York and Los Angeles combined. Overall, there were more than 2,300 shootings in Chicago last year, according to the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Police Department. Less than 2% of those shootings involved law-enforcement officers, but police shootings receive the lion’s share of attention from the press and thus give the public a distorted picture of what’s happening. The story is similar in New York City, where police shootings are down by roughly 95% over the past 4½ decades. The most recent figures for New York are from 2017, when police shot 19 people, 10 of them fatally. It’s the lowest number on record, according the New York Police Department’s annual report.

Journalists these days state matter-of-factly that there’s an epidemic in this country of trigger-happy cops gunning for black people. Anecdotes substitute for statistics and historical trends that offer perspective. Based largely on this slanted coverage, protesters have marched in the streets nationwide and professional athletes have refused to stand for the national anthem. What the empirical data actually show seems to be a secondary concern for reporters, if not for police officials trying to do their jobs. Mr. Johnson said he’ll be praying for Mr. Smollett, but perhaps it’s Mr. Johnson and the people he’s trying to protect who need of our prayers.

This piece originally appeared at The Wall Street Journal

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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal