Fake Hamas statistics and plastic straws ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Thursday, February 13, 2025

Fake Hamas statistics and plastic straws

Until today, I did not know this fact from The Free Press:

The biggest environmentalist craze of my generation started in 2011 with Vermont 9-year-old Milo Cress cooking up an arbitrary number for how many plastic straws Americans used daily. This 9-year-old figured it was so many. He says he called up straw manufacturers and calculated 500 million a day. Boom, big number, good number. The mainstream media was off to the races. That 500 million a day number was cited in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Suddenly the most important thing we could do for the environment—for our children!—was ban plastic straws.

For many years, the media repeated this "500 million straws a day" number without doing a basic fact check of the calculations of a nine-year old boy. That source only received wide coverage starting in 2018.

A couple of marketing firms did try. It turns out it is harder to count straws than one might think. Many are imported, for example. But there aren't that many plastic straw manufacturers in the US. It shouldn't be that difficult to find a better number (which, according to those firms, stands at somewhere between 180 million and 350 million daily.)

Why didn't the media bother to check this big, fat, round number?

Because they wanted to believe it. It fit in with their politics and their instincts.

It was, as journalists sometimes say, too good to check.

And that is how we get to Hamas' bogus casualty numbers.

People like me have shown that their numbers - for total people killed, for women and children killed, for injuries, for missing people under the rubble, and others - did not add up. Multiple sources of data were incompatible with each other. They were lying, and they continue to lie.

And yet the very people whose jobs are supposed to be to dig out the truth - reporters, medical researchers, NGOs - treat the Hamas numbers as legitimate.

The same way they trusted the plastic straw estimate of a nine year old boy.

There were two separate but related problems here: believing and reporting the original statistics as absolute truth, and continuing to do so over time without even checking.

Just as nearly no editors asked for a verification of the original numbers, so did almost none of them show any desire to review the statistics as more information becomes available over time. The reason is that they don't want to admit that their original assertions were wrong. Government agencies continue to use the 500 million number.

And we will continue to see Hamas' made up numbers for years to come. from sources that people trust.

The media isn't going to change. Hopefully media consumers can learn to be more discerning about what they believe.