POLIBIZ – In a 3-hour podcast with Joe Rogan, former President Donald Trump, in the flow of talking about modern mainstream media’s honesty, recalled his experience of being falsely fact-checked on crime increase claim, while Kamala Harris was not treated the same for her false statement of “no American active-duty soldiers in combat zones” during their presidential debate in Oct 2024.
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| Donald Trump and Podcaster Joe Rogan in an episode premiered on 26th Oct 2024 |
In the presidential debate, Trump claimed that “... Crime in this country is through the roof. And we have a new form of crime. It's called migrant crime. And it's happening at levels that nobody thought possible.” ABC moderator David Muir then fact-checked: “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.” Trump stroke back “Excuse me, the FBI -- they were defrauding statements. They didn't include the worst cities. They didn't include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud. Just like their number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud”.
Not until Oct 2024 then some experts examined FBI’s data on crime and found out that in its quietly updated data release in Sept 2024, the crime in 2022 actually increased by 4.5% (instead of falling by 2.1% as per the previous report), so there was a major shift of 6.7% in its statistics.
The new data released by FBI has justified Trump’s past claim on the through-the-roof crime partly caused by illegal immigration. However, David Muir was not totally wrong at that time about his information because he referred to FBI’s reports. What’s wrong with him was a constant fact-check on Trump even in some topics Muir himself was not sure about.
In the interview with Joe, Trump recalled his experience: “When I said crime is soaring, he [Muir] said no no - crime has gone down. I said where did you hear that one crime has gone down. I mean I'm debating with this guy, but I've had that well there was amended FBI statistics that came out after that showed the crime had gone up substantially. And by the way, the statistics were a fraud because when they put out the statistics, they didn't include some of the worst places; they didn't include some of the worst cities.”
Trump also mentioned the problem of unreported crimes because of the lack of manpower in police stations. Trump took the chance to voice his support for the police forces, saying “most of them [cops] are great” and “that's horrible, it's the dumbest idea of all to make them feel terrible” and “it's also very irresponsible thing where people say defund the police, get rid of the police and even Harris was a part of”.
Also in the Sept presidential debate, Kamala Harris stated that “And as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world, the first time this century.” Her statement was not fact-checked despite it was immediately wrong under the eyes of any standard journalists, not to mention the generals, military experts or high-class politicians.
Unhappy with the unfairness he suffered, Donald Trump complained that “If this is going to be an actual real debate and not a propaganda exercise, if it's going to be a real debate, you have to fact check everybody”. The fact-checks should also clarify the categories of statement validity such as “being not true”, “lie on purpose”, “ignorance” ...
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