The "Out-of-Context" Bait and Switch Tactic

The media has been at it again, taking a snippet from a commentary and running wild with the quote out of context in order to tar and feather the one who said it. Enter the case of William Bennett, who has now famously said (only as far as the media reported) "You could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." In and of itself, it seems inflammatory and racist. However, if you look at his comments in their entirety, it makes complete sense, and shows how ludicrous that type of extreme reaction would be.

It started with a phone call to his radio show, the caller commenting that if there hadn't been the 45 million abortions over the years, then Social Security wouldn't be in jeopardy because there would be that many more in the workforce to keep it afloat. Bennett warned the caller not to look at solely the economic benefits of eradication abortion, but that there are other benefits and repercussions of ending the infanticide in our nation. He went on to say:

"If you wanted to reduce crime, you could – if that were your sole purpose – you could abort every black baby in this country, and our crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky."

Bennett apparently said this to make a point of how ridiculous and morally egregious such a "solution" to other problems, such as crime, would be. Some people wonder why he linked the black population with crime, but as Pat Buchanan stated:

Bennett says the issue has arisen in the wake of Katrina, where not only were the black poor the most visible victims, they appear to have been the great majority of victimizers, shooters, looters and rapists preying on the unfortunate. The "whole issue of crime and race" has been on people's minds since New Orleans, The Washington Post quotes Bennett as saying. And, he added, it is aired frequently in academic settings. No big deal.... Yet, according to The Washington Times, the stereotype is rooted in truth. The Times concludes its Bennett article with this stark paragraph: "A study last year by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics said that about 44 percent of state and federal prisoners in 2003 were black, 35 percent were white, 19 percent were Hispanic, and 2 percent were of other races." Now, since the white population is six times the black population in America, but blacks outnumber whites in prison five-to-four, algebra tells us violent crime in black America is seven times as great as in the white community.

Economist Walter Williams went on to expound that Bennett's hypothetical response was a way of illustrating a cause-and-effect situation, albeit in an extreme scenario. He also echoes Buchanan's statistics about the disproportionate number of crimes being committed by blacks:

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports for 2003 [a .pdf document], blacks, who are 13 percent of the population, were 49 percent of murder arrests, 33 percent of arrests for rape, and 54 percent of arrests for robberies. That means Bennett's statement was true. One could make another conditional statement: If male babies were aborted, there would be an even larger reduction in crime. While males are slightly less than 50 percent of the population, according to FBI reports, they constitute 90 percent of the arrests for murder, 99 percent of the arrests for rape and 90 percent of the arrests for robberies. What the crime statistics unambiguously demonstrate is that males, as a group, and blacks, as a group, are disproportionately represented in criminal activity. If making the true statement that males are disproportionately represented in criminal activity doesn't make one a sexist, at least I haven't heard such an accusation, why then would making the true statement that blacks are disproportionately represented in criminal activity make one a racist as Bennett has been charged?

Walters goes on to conclude that

Economists Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner argue in their best-selling book, "Freakonomics," that the legalization of abortion has reduced crime because babies who have been aborted were more likely to have grown up poor and in single-parent or teenage-parent households and therefore more likely to commit crimes. Their hypothesis has encountered criticism within the profession, but so far, no one has charged them with racism, sexism or making inappropriate comments.

This is just another situation in which the media has decided to pick and choose what it releases, out of context, in juicy soundbytes that will get lots of attention--particularly negative--against conservatives that they hope to discredit. Unfortunately, it's a double standard that doesn't apply to the left-leaning individuals of society.