This is one for the annals of fake news. A federal agency is blundering around with erroneous but inflammatory data on a major topic of national contention, it gets called out by a government-supported news outlet ā¦ and it does nothing about it. Our Corruption Chronicles blogĀ peeksĀ into the window of this fun house.
In an amusing story, a government-funded media outlet notorious for its liberalĀ slantĀ found that the overwhelming majority of school shootings listed in a federalĀ reportĀ never occurred.
The embarrassing blunder involves Department of Education (DOE) figures stating that schools around the U.S. reported an alarming 235 shootingsĀ in one year.
National Public Radio (NPR) launched an investigation and actually contacted every one of the schools included in the DOE data, which was gathered by its Office for Civil Rights. The figures focus on the 2015-2016 school year and reveal that ānearly 240 schoolsā¦reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting.ā
Three months later, after every school was contacted by NPR, the stats changed drastically. More than two-thirds of the reported gun incidents never happened, according to the news outlet.
āWe were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports,ā the article states. āIn 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldnāt confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didnāt meet the governmentās parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didnāt respond to our inquiries.ā
A program director at the nonprofit research organization that assisted NPR in analyzing the bogus government data is quoted in the piece saying: āWhen weāre talking about such an important and rare event, [this] amount of data error could be very meaningful.ā
Even though the DOE is the agency responsible for disseminating the erroneous information, in typical government fashion, it shrugged it off as no big deal. When asked for comment by reporters, the agency said it relies on school districts to provide accurate information. Evidently, the federal agency doesnāt bother checking data before publishing it as fact. In the meantime, the DOE has no plans to correct the errors. The article points out that the confusion comes at a time when the need for clear data on school violence has never been more pressing. Dozens of school safety measures have been enacted nationwide on the heels of high-profile school shootings in Texas and Florida and public districts are allocating large sums to boost campus security.
