Fact-check the fact-checkers?-----Narrative Before Facts | City Journal

Narrative Before Facts | City Journal: 

• When will the media acknowledge their role in spreading false and inflammatory stories about police shootings?

When officer Rusten Sheskey shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back last year, the media wasted no time establishing the standard narrative: another unarmed African-American shot by racist police.

• In a CNN segment on August 25, anchor Jake Tapper said, “Video shows police shoot unarmed black man.” The Washington Post, CNN, PBS, Buzzfeed, Vogue, and several other outlets referred to Blake as “unarmed.” The day after the shooting, David A. Graham, a staff writer at The Atlantic, asserted, “It’s nearly impossible to imagine any way that his shooting was justified.”
• Democratic politicians and celebrities jumped on the story, too. Joe Biden tweeted, “Once again, a Black man—Jacob Blake—was shot by the police. In front of his children. It makes me sick. Is this the country we want to be?” Kamala Harris declared that “the life of a black person in America has never been treated as fully human.” Naomi Osaka, the highest-paid female athlete in the world, tweeted to her more than 800,000 followers condemnation of the “continued genocide of Black people at the hand of the police.”
  

But as Blake himself admitted in a television interview with ABC News last week, he was not unarmed. “I realized I had dropped my knife, I had a little pocketknife, so I picked it up,” Blake told Michael Strahan on Good Morning America. More critically, Blake admitted his actions at the time were wrong: “I shouldn’t have picked it up . . . considering what was going on. . . . At that time I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

Blake’s astonishing admission came days after Kenosha County District Attorney Mike Graveley announced that his office would not charge Officer Sheskey, based on the results of an investigation by former Madison police chief Noble Wray. 

...The most damning detail in this story, however, is that the victim himself, Blake, has expressed more honesty and remorse for his actions than the media and political elites who pushed an inflammatory, racialized narrative before all the facts were in...Read all.