But to be in the news business and not know the basic facts is not a good look.

I commented back in May in Journalists broadcasting their reports without evidence on NPR's increasing habit, whenever reporting on something Trump might have said, to append it with "claimed without evidence."

Since then, I have noted the bad habit spreading to other news outlets. Whenever he says something they don't like, which is pretty much anything he says, they quote in the fashion . . . "Trump claimed without evidence."

As I noted in the original post, Trump is bombastic and of course some things he says are simply wrong, many things have a grain of truth but are overstated, and some things he states are simply factually correct. By formulating his words in such a fashion as to imply that he is lying all the time, the MSM are actually doing more damage to themselves than to him.

I also noted that this tends to be Trump's modus operandi. The damage done to the media comes by far the most from the things the media does to itself when responding to Trump than from anything Trump does directly. He makes them so crazy that they then demonstrate it.

This "without evidence" bad habit was bad enough before, but now it is getting absurd. This morning I see:

When asked about George Floyd’s death by CBS News, President Trump said it was terrible but stated more white than Black people are killed at the hands of police in the U.S., without giving any evidence of the claim pic.twitter.com/4vB01AfnVW

— Reuters (@Reuters) July 15, 2020

Reuters is implying both that Trump is lying and that the claim is not true.

Yet this is one of the most credibly and longest established facts in crime literature. It has been confirmed by multiple research papers over many years. I am unaware of any published research using any sort of rigorous methodology that denies it.

It is obvious in the statistics that the Washington Post has been maintaining for the past few years of all police shootings. Statistics which are publicly available. Does Reuters think the Washington Post is some sort of covert white-supremacist group propagating untruths?
Once again, how could this slip through?

Absence of editors?

Reporters who do not know the facts of their beat?

Headline writers who have not contextual knowledge?

Motivated partisanship or ideological fervor?

Who knows? But to be in the news business and not know the basic facts is not a good look.