Fair and balanced
By 
Earlier today I wondered how the media are going to handle the tricky situation created by the fact that the front-runner for the GOP nomination is both a racist demagogue and a pathological liar. How many “journalists” will surrender to the professional bad habit of framing brazen no-two-ways-about-it lies as “controversial” statements, about which there can be a variety of legitimate opinions?
Consider this nugget from Cory Bennett of the Weekly World News Hill:
However, the percentages do, in some ways, align with Department of Justice (DOJ) findings from several years ago. A DOJ study released in 2011 reported that 93 percent of black homicides were committed by other blacks between 1980 and 2008.
In 2014, that figure was roughly 90 percent in 2014, according to the latest DOJ numbers.
The category tweeted out by Trump that doesn’t fit with DOJ statistics is “Whites Killed by Whites,” which Trump’s tweet indicated was 16 percent.
According to the department’s 2011 report, 84 percent of white homicides were committed by whites between 1980 and 2008. That number was 82 percent in 2014.
Contrary to Bennett, the category of interest here is “whites killed by blacks,” which Trump’s tweet claimed made up 81% of all murders of whites (the true percentage is a sixth of that).
Trump’s claims are true “in some ways,” in the trivial sense that they contain assertions that nobody has ever questioned, along with the crazy lies that should be the exclusive subject of journalistic commentary, because it’s the crazy lies that are newsworthy.
In other words, claiming that Trump’s racist lies regarding this subject “in some ways” reflect the actual facts is no different than saying that the claims of Holocaust deniers “in some ways” reflect reality, because after all, as deniers argue, a lot of Jews did die as a result of harsh conditions in labor camps, as opposed to being directly murdered. It’s just that the other stuff about how millions weren’t gassed and shot in an extermination campaign happens to be false.