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A data scientist said he was fired from Thomson Reuters in 2021 after he pushed back against their “lies” about the Black Lives Matter movement.
Zac Kriegman detailed his experience working for the business information service in a guest post on former NYT opinion editor Bari Weiss’ Substack, Thursday.
As a director of data science, it was “his job” to sift through numbers and “figure out what they meant,” Kriegman wrote. But when he examined the data surrounding police-officer involved shootings of unarmed Black men, he determined the facts didn’t support Black Lives Matter’s claims.
“The data was unequivocal. It showed that, if anything, police were slightly less likely to use lethal force against Black suspects than White ones,” he wrote.
A protester waves a Black Lives Matter flag during the demonstration. Hours after the verdict of the Derek Chauvin trial, protesters meet outside of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s home to protest his proposed funding of the Los Angeles Police Department. (Getty Images)
Fearing backlash because of “fervent and vocal support” for the movement within the company, Kriegman said he sat on his findings, “for months.”
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“I continued to read Reuters’ reporting on the movement, and started to see how the company’s misguided worldview about policing and racism was distorting the way we were reporting news stories to the public,” he wrote.
Kriegman said he noted “a pattern” where Thomson Reuters went from “ignoring facts that undermined the BLM narrative” to “just reporting lies.”
He accused the organization of “misinforming” readers on an issue which influenced public policies that he found increased violence in Black neighborhoods, left him “deeply unsettled.”
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Protesters decry the death of George Floyd, Michael Ramos and police brutality against Black Americans in front of the Austin Police Department headquarters in Austin on June 5, 2020. (Lola Gomez/Austin American-Statesman via AP, File)
After struggling to speak up, Kriegman finally attempted to share his research with his colleagues and boss, but said he was met with threats and hostility.
“I was distraught. Here I was trying to bring the company’s attention to how we were spreading lies that were contributing to the murders of thousands of Black people, and I was compared to a Klansman sympathizer, and forbidden by the company to discuss any of it,” he said.
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In the Substack post, he detailed how the Human Resources division threatened to fire him and shortly afterward, they did.
He ended the post calling for Americans of all political stripes to see how “deeply compromised our news sources have become,” and to hold them accountable to accurate reporting, even if it went against the “popular narrative.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Zac Kriegman said he was fired from Thomson Reuters, not Reuters. An earlier version of this article erroneously said he was fired from Reuters. Fox News Digital regrets the mistake and has corrected.
Source: www.foxnews.com