When a left-leaning journalist or academic rails about “misinformation,” it typically means factually accurate information that is politically inconvenient for them, and which they therefore dismiss as lacking the “necessary context” that favors their political position.

A classic example is how journalists like Radley Balko and academics like Marc Owen Jones dismiss evidence that white people are not unusually violent by calling it “misinformation” when non-progressives like Elon Musk cite such evidence. Never mind that crime statistics show that whites are not more violent. The rates of committing homicide “for blacks were more than 7 times higher than the rates for whites” between 1976 and 2005, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics in its publication, Homicide Trends in the United States. In 2019, 6,425 black people committed homicide, compared to only 4,728 white people, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports.

On May 5, Elon Musk commented on a tweet by End Wokeness correctly citing federal crime statistics showing that there were 547,948 “interracial violent crime incidents” committed by blacks against whites in 2018, compared to 112,365 committed by whites against blacks. Thus, federal statistics show blacks committed over 400,000 more violent crimes against whites than whites committed against blacks. Musk pointed out that some journalists inaccurately leave the contrary impression, asking “why would the media misrepresent the real situation to such an extreme degree”? Journalists like Balko who focus on criminal justice issues focus on the relatively rare instances in which whites kill blacks, such as the death of an aggressive black homeless man on the subway who was restrained by a white marine veteran and died as a result. But in reality, blacks are much more likely to kill whites than whites are to kill blacks.