There are a couple of things at play here, and both of them ought to be aired as we discuss this rather peculiar tweet from New Orleans’ CBS affiliate…

Despite his recent remarks on the campaign trail, former President Donald Trump did not deploy the National Guard to Minneapolis in 2020. Gov. Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ vice presidential pick, did. https://t.co/0gW3jssp9V

— WWL-TV (@WWLTV) August 6, 2024

What we notice is a method of slanting the news which has always existed but has really come to the forefront, and we’ll call it a double standard of precision.

In this case it’s pretty obvious. Anybody with an intermediate command of American civics knows that the deployment of the National Guard is a function of a state governor. Not the President of the United States.

And here’s what Trump said on the campaign trail a week and a half ago at a campaign stop in St. Cloud, which is a suburb of Minneapolis…

“Immediately every voter in Minnesota needs to know that when the violent mobs of anarchists and looters and Marxists came to burn down Minneapolis four years ago, remember me? I couldn’t get your governor to act. He’s supposed to call in the National Guard or the Army and he didn’t do it … So I sent in the National Guard.”

So WWL-TV shares that piece from Verify This, which is a Snopes-y site operating from a left-wing perspective, and it calls Trump a liar for saying he sent in the National Guard.

This brings us to another point, something which has been the case since 2016 and it’s been priced into his stock ever since, which is that Donald Trump cannot be taken literally, but rather ought to be taken seriously.

What Trump is saying when he claims he sent in the National Guard was that he had threatened Walz and Jacob Frey, the Minneapolis mayor, with a presidential declaration under the Insurrection Act that would allow him to deploy the military. At the time he was trashed for doing so, and there was a ton of pearl-clutching over the “dictator Trump” trampling on states’ rights.

He’s taking credit for forcing Walz’ hand in getting the National Guard onto the streets in Minneapolis.

And he isn’t wrong for doing so. At the time, Walz was actively supporting the rioters and declaring that George Floyd had been “murdered,” which was a completely irresponsible thing for a governor to say. Walz gave license to the people who did a half-billion dollars worth of property damage in his largest city, and what was worse was that his daughter actually told the rioters that he wouldn’t be sending the Guard in.

Trump is claiming that Walz reversed himself because he pressured the governor to do so.

Now that Walz is Kamala Harris’ vice-presidential choice, we’re getting this insistence on precision from Trump when what’s actually relevant here is two things: first, why did it take Walz so long to deploy resources to save Minneapolis from destruction, and second, what influenced him to finally take that action?

Of course he’s going to deny that Trump was the reason for the latter. Admitting it would bolster what’s likely to be a loud narrative from Trump’s camp that this election pits the Make America Great Again ticket against the Make America Burn Again ticket. But if it wasn’t Trump, then what made Walz change his mind from sympathizing with the looters and arsonists on Minneapolis’ streets to cracking down on them?

There really isn’t any good answer here. If it’s that four days of rioting was enough, then the response is “why isn’t ONE day of rioting enough?” What, to Tim Walz, is an acceptable amount of property damage in a Black Lives Matter riot? If $500 million is too much, does that mean $100 million is OK? How about $200 million?

If you’re going to provide proper vetting in this campaign, WWL, maybe those are the issues you ought to be looking into.

So we’re demanding precise language from Trump, and refusing to interpret his claims in a manner that would make them meaningful in analyzing what actually happened. But we’re not getting any demand for precision from Walz, the guy ACTUALLY responsible for keeping Minneapolis from burning down.

Shouldn’t Tim Walz get some vetting from the press? Apparently that’s not much of a priority for WWL-TV. Instead, they’d like to nit-pick their way through Trump’s campaign speeches for hyperbole, tall tales and imprecisions, when the public has long since realized those are just part and parcel of how he communicates.

Meanwhile, Walz offered a fairly dishonest statement of his own last night in Philadelphia when he boasted that crime is down all over the country. Even former Obama political guru David Axelrod took issue with that rather questionable claim…

After viewing video of Walz saying that violent crime rose during the Trump administration and quipping that that doesn’t count Trump’s crimes, Axelrod said, “There’s danger a little bit in that. Obviously, the way he landed the punchline was very, very effective, just reminding people who Trump is. The truth is, crime is down and it’s down across the country. But there are certain kinds of crimes that are not that go right to the quality of life in some of these urban communities. And so, an honest rendering of this is to talk about that too, because — and I suspect that they will. Even though crime is down, there are certain property crimes and other kinds of crimes that are really vexing and people are concerned about it. There’s no reason to run away from that. The point — the difference between that they should point out between Trump and their approach is he views these problems as weapons to mobilize his base. He does not view these problems as something to be solved. And I think they have to engage on some of those things.”

Most people in America’s most dangerous urban areas will tell you that statistics which point toward a diminution of crime in America don’t reflect the reality that it’s reporting of crime which is down rather than crime itself, and this is at least in part a reflection of the reduction in policy activity as a result of policies the Left favors. Spending on police is down in a lot of these places thanks to the “defund the police” movement Kamala Harris and Tim Walz both supported, and also thanks to mass resignations and early retirements by veteran cops on urban police forces which have gutted their professionalism.

Then you have the “Ferguson effect,” meaning that cops are less likely to engage in frequent patrols or assertive policing in bad neighborhoods for fear that residents, and particularly black residents, will act in ways which make racial incidents more likely. The Ferguson effect could be a significant factor in disconnecting crime statistics from the reality on the streets; if the cops are nowhere to be found, and if the local folks know they’re not coming, who’s going to report a rape or a break-in or an assault?

These are things which matter. We’re getting zero discussion of them from legacy corporate media organs like WWL-TV, and zero demands for precision when politicians like Walz make the claims they do.