Commentary By Rachel Emmanuel for The Western Journal July 6, 2023
On Monday, Fox News published a report titled: “Trump draws massive crowd of at least 50K in small South Carolina town of 3,400: police.”
The article covered former President Donald Trump’s rally in Pickens, South Carolina, on Saturday, which, according to the police chief of the town, drew a crowd of over 50,000 Trump supporters to the tiny town.
But community note contributors on Twitter weren’t willing to accept that the former president was still able to draw crowds of this size.
A community note was added to the Fox News tweet of the article that read: “Police Chief Randall Beach initially estimated the crowd to be 50,000, he said he would need to confirm those numbers with the Secret Service. A Secret Service agent later clarified to the news that approximately 15,000 were in attendance.”
But it turns out the fact-checkers were doing a little less “fact-checking” and a little more “fact manipulation.”
The fact-checkers cited an article from Greenville News to support their community note.
The relevant section cited read:
“Pre-rally estimates of 10,000 to 30,000 were made. During his remarks, Trump claimed the turnout was 75,000. Beach said he needed to get an accurate count from the Secret Service before providing a final number. Around 11 am, a secret service agent told the News there are 5,000 inside the gate and approximately 10,000 still in line.”
Sidebar: Do you trust fact-checkers?
Yes: 1% (7 Votes)
No: 99% (1197 Votes)
With some convenient cherry-picking, the fact-checkers used the estimated 5,000 people inside plus the 10,000 still in line mentioned by the Secret Service agent and came up with a grand total of 15,000 people at the rally.
An impressive math feat.
What they did not mention, however, is that that estimate was made at 11 o’clock in the morning. Trump’s plane hadn’t even landed at that point, according to Politico.
Tens of thousands pack Pickens. More than 50 treated for heat-related illness.
Moreover, the article cited is titled: “Trump in SC: Tens of thousands pack Pickens. More than 50 treated for heat-related illness.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but “tens” of thousands generally means more than one ten and a five.
But, maybe the fact-checkers missed the fact that the title of the article they cited implies in its title that there were well more than 15,000 there that day.
They must have also missed the part in the very same article they cited where Beach “reiterated his crowd estimate of 50,000.”
“I would not be shocked if it were closer to 60 (thousand),” he told the newspaper. “If someone has an estimate closer to 70 (thousand), I wouldn’t question it.”
That statement by Beach was made on Sunday, the day after the rally, not at 11 a.m. on Saturday, hours before the rally had even started.
So the part about the Secret Service agent’s estimate being the “later” one was, let’s just say, sadly mistaken.
Cherry-picking when it comes to how stories are reported is nothing new, especially when the news is conservative and even more when the story has the word “Trump” in it. So it’s important to stay vigilant, even on a so-called bias-free platform like Twitter.
As for the contributors who wrote the community note on the article — if I were a gambler, I’d take any odds that at least one of them has the letters “CNN” in their employment bio.
CNN — or CBS, or CNBC, or MSNBC, etc. –TPR
