What percentage of Democrats believe Kyle Rittenhouse shot black men?

There are major outlets declaring the verdict midtrial.

And there are a hundred other details we could harp on. For instance, check out this Washington Post podcast in which the host says Rittenhouse lives “in a different state” without naming it. That makes it sound like he lives far away. In reality, Rittenhouse lives in Antioch, Illinois, which borders Wisconsin. The closest Costco to his house is the one just outside Kenosha.

But these arguments get tiresome. The podcasters could defend themselves — it’s true that Antioch is in a different state from Kenosha!

Similarly, journalists could all defend their weird commentary about race in this story. Again, this Washington Post podcast says Rittenhouse “shot three protestors. The protests were over the police shooting of a young black man named Jacob Blake.” The hosts worry that if Rittenhouse is acquitted, it would “embolden anti-black figures” to believe “if you shoot them, you might be able to get away with it.”

The hosts never mention that Rittenhouse shot three white men and zero nonwhite men. But they never explicitly claim anything different.

I don’t pick on this podcast because it’s extraordinarily biased, but because this bias is kind of ordinary. The tone of media coverage has led many people to believe Rittenhouse shot black people.

We ought to poll the public and ask people which news outlets they rely on. Ask them their partisan alignment. And then ask them a few factual questions:

1. How many miles from his home do you think Kyle Rittenhouse traveled to get to Kenosha?
2. Did Rittenhouse carry a gun across state lines before arriving in Kenosha?
3. How many black men did Rittenhouse shoot?
4. Were any of the men Rittenhouse shot armed?

I suspect that more than one-third of Democrats would get all four of those questions wrong. A clear majority would get question 2 wrong (Rittenhouse obtained his gun from a friend in Wisconsin).

If we ran these polls and my suspicions were confirmed, that would show that the media have failed at their job of informing the public — that they erred in a way that reinforces most editors’ and reporters’ personal prejudices and partisan affiliation.

At the Washington Examiner, we conducted just such a poll a few years ago regarding an issue that generates far less impassioned debate.

When Republicans passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in late 2017, coverage of the bill by CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, et cetera was so misleading that I often felt like slamming my head against the wall. They succeeded in wrongly convincing millions of Americans that the bill was a tax hike for the middle class, which shows that they failed to do their jobs.

I wrote about the slanted coverage back then:

“It does not help individuals who are below $100,000,” reporter Ron Insana said on an MSNBC segment with me. “In fact, it probably doesn’t help individuals who are below $200,000, given the analysis we’ve seen thus far. It is not a middle-class tax cut.” The Associated Press announced the House passage of the bill with a tweet saying “House passes first rewrite of nation’s tax laws in three decades, providing steep tax cuts for businesses, the wealthy.”

So we polled people and found that most Democrats, probably acting on the media’s cue, materially misunderstood what the bill did:

“A full third (33 percent) of Americans think the bill raises taxes on middle-class families in 2018 … Only 28 percent answered correctly, saying the bill cuts taxes on most middle-class families … Democrats were much more likely to have been misled here: 51 percent said 2018 taxes will be higher for most middle-class families, while only 9 percent of Democrats correctly answered that the bill cuts middle-class taxes this year.”

So yeah, media bias has an effect. It misleads readers and viewers about simple factual matters. It would be good to poll this effect regularly.