Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria gave a speech about race relations to cadets on Sept. 29 at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., after someone wrote racial slurs on message boards outside the dorm rooms of five black students. It was later revealed it was a black student who had perpetrated a hoax...
...Now, as everyone knows, there's an update to the story. The cadet candidate who reported the racial slurs has admitted that he was behind the whole thing. It was all a hoax. The young man, who is black, has left the academy.
Anyone who follows such incidents, certainly anyone in the news business, should have known that there was a substantial chance the Air Force Academy vandalism was a fake. Too many such incidents have turned out to be hoaxes not to raise suspicions about new ones, pending the results of an investigation.
There was the young black man in Kansas who admitted writing racist graffiti on his car. There was the black man in Michigan charged in three racist graffiti incidents at Eastern Michigan University. There was the young Muslim woman in New York who admitted making up a story about being attacked by white Trump supporters. The black Bowling Green State University student who said white Trump supporters threw rocks at her. The University of Louisiana student who said a white man wearing a Trump hat tried to pull off her hijab.
Then there was the wave of stories about threats to Jewish community centers — stories that received widespread news coverage in the context of the new Trump presidency. Most of the threats were made by a teenager in Israel, with the others made by a former journalist who was somehow trying to get back at a former girlfriend.
None of that means that all hate crimes reports are false. But it does mean people reporting and commenting on them should be cautious until the facts are known.
Gen. Silveria chose not to be cautious.
Byron York: At Air Force Academy, a perfect hoax for age of Trump
The problem is most hate and terrorism is faked, and if not, then often the reporting is.
( read about CNNs behavior on this issue at the link - it takes reporting to make terrorism effective.)
It's the agendas behind the terrorisms that have to go.