Liberal Press Again Skews Facts About Firearms Violence Research

Gun Violence Researchers Race to Protect Data From Trump | WIRED:
(February 07, 2017)

 AROUND 11 AM Pacific on January 20th, while newly-inaugurated President Trump finished a celebratory lunch in the Capitol Rotunda, Magdalena Cerd  noticed something different about the White House’s website: All of its references to climate change had disappeared. Cerd  is an epidemiologist at UC Davis’ Violence Prevention Research Program, which focuses on another politicized region of science—gun violence. So she knew what that meant.  (emphasis added)

Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn't know what 'that meant'; but the insinuation that the Trump White House was censoring published (or private) research data about "Climate Change" is obvious,

There are a lot of details which are not examined or made clear in this amateurish article, which suggests that it should be ignored except as an example of unprofessional reporting.  It's more important for what information it does not provide, than for the bias which is revealed.

And even more telling, research data about "gun violence" was, as insinuated by this WIRED article, also at risk of having been "disappeared".

This article is a patent attack on the integrity of the Trump White house, for purely political reasons.

 “It was a real call to action,” Cerd  says. With links to climate data vanishing, she worried the same thing could happen to gun violence data on websites belonging to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “I was on Amtrak between Berkeley and Sacramento,” she says. “So I sent an email to Garen Wintemute saying we needed to start downloading our data immediately.”

Does that mean that the research data of the UC Davis' Violence Prevention Research Program was not regularly backed up?

This is difficult to believe, considering that tens of thousands of dollars were probably invested in the research.   The UC Davis Web Master wasn't encouraging the research teams to perform website and data backups at least daily (and more responsibly, more than once a day) or that the data wasn't available on an offsite data repository?   It's a base canard against the professional practices of a respected Educational and Research Facility.

Rather than to point the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate at UC Davis tech support, I find it much more likely that the UC Davis research program managed to lose (at least temporarily ... whether they recovered the data is not discussed in the article) valuable research data, and in an attempt to cover up their embarrassing lack of data integrity supervision has chosen to blame their oversight on an external agency.

Specifically, a political foe:  the current President of the United States of America.

The suggestion that the President would be responsible for a loss of research data is not only bizarre, but it is a sad commentary on whomever provided the 'background' information for this article ... and for the author, who rushed to judgement by printing innuendo instead of facts.

(In fact, the article suggests that the President had the power, and the resources, to delete 'research data' from multiple, federally funded, generally reliable websites such as the Center for Disease control!)

And the worst approbation is for the website, which allowed this article to be published without requiring the minimum standard of finding at least two sources which support the same interpretation.

I once considered WIRED to be a reliable data source, if only for its technical content.
Now that the website has undermined its own integrity, every single word they ever published will be tainted.

So long WIRED.   Nobody will ever trust you, since you turned Political.

(The Flying Fickle Finger of Fate Award)