Lemmy Lemmy:
BartSimpson BartSimpson:
I suspect that several instances of the alleged hoaxes are actually instances of the same hoax being reported in various local media with each instance of said reporting being counted as a separate incident. Not an uncommon tactic in the media to stack their stats this way to make something appear to be more widespread than it actually is.
Would that be true, also, of alleged attacks or just the hoaxes?
The thing here is that the reported attacks can be individually substantiated while this reported spate of hoaxes cannot. They can't even identify who reported the hoaxes.
I won't call it out as an outright lie but I have seen the tactic of counting each separate report of the same incident as a separate incident and this might be one of those cases.
Sometime back a California law enforcement agency got caught fudging their stats by claiming they'd closed a remarkable number of criminal investigations. The fact was that when they closed a criminal case on (say) a shooting they also closed each individual report of the same shooting and then they claimed those closures as separate issues.
It only came up when a disparity was noted between the city's claim and their actual FBI statistics which showed a drastically lower closure rate.
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