Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at a hard-hitting New York Times report on how racism impacts birds, call out a BBC report on medieval plague in London, and cover more media misses.

The New York Times Is for the Birds

The New York Times brings readers a report on the most pressing issue of our time: how “bigoted urban policies” are impacting birds.

The report, delivered amid ongoing wars in the Gaza Strip and Ukraine, explains “why warblers flock to wealthier neighborhoods.”

The story begins with a 2020 study in the journal Science, “Ecological and evolutionary consequences of systemic racism in urban environments.”

The study, led by Christopher J. Schell, an ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, “synthesized what a handful of urban ecologists around the country had begun demonstrating: that patterns of bigotry and inequality affect how other species experience life in cities.”

Schell told the Times he sought to show that urban heterogeneity is “driven by systemic inequities,” including “oppression, residential segregation, gentrification and displacement, unjust zoning laws, homelessness, so on, so on, so on.”

“How we operate influences the rest of the natural world as well as the social world.”

The report states the obvious explanation for the differing bird populations: that variations in cities “include the numbers of parks and street trees in different neighborhoods, whether a highway or rail line ripped through a community or whether an oil refinery spewed toxins into the air.”

The new focus is the result of urban ecologists bringing environmental justice into the study of biodiversity conservation.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies.”

Earlier this year, President Biden signed an executive order directing all federal agencies to make it their “mission” to work toward “environmental justice for all.” The order created a White House Office of Environmental Justice.

The order aims to “better protect overburdened communities from pollution and environmental harms.” It claims that “racism is a fundamental driver of environmental injustice,” according to the White House.

“Often the interests of other species and marginalized humans align,” Madhusudan Katti, an ecologist at North Carolina State University, told the New York Times. “It’s very much a colonial perspective to think about humans and wildlife as separate. We need to start thinking about humans and wildlife together in the landscape and mitigate things that will help both.”

The article discusses the alleged connection between redlining and bird diversity.

Eric M. Wood, an ornithologist and urban ecologist with California State University in Los Angeles and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, found that “predominantly white neighborhoods” in Los Angeles that were “greenlined,” were often home to a “greater abundance of birds that generally live in forests, such as warblers, wrens and bluebirds.

Wood compared Beverly Hills to Boyle Heights, a largely Hispanic neighborhood that “shows up as a large red blob on the HOLC map and has far fewer trees and green spaces.”

“You get loads of these birds that require insects for their life history, and they go to a place like Beverly Hills because there are trees and flowers,” he said.

So, the Times dedicated an entire article to reminding readers that birds tend to live in neighborhoods that have more trees. And why does the diversity of the local bird population matter to the residents of these blighted, tree-less neighborhoods, who presumably have more pressing problems? It doesn’t, not specifically anyway; the birds are just another lens through which social inequities can be viewed:

These differing landscapes clearly matter to the birds. But is it important to people if they share their neighborhoods with a common raven rather than a yellow-rumped warbler? “The point is that there are just so many differences” between communities like Beverly Hills and Boyle Heights, Dr. Wood said. The birds were “an indicator of these broader conditions that are effectively bad for people.”

One proposed solution to the alleged problem is to address “inequity in wildlife observation.” In other words, the residents of these lower-income neighborhoods should adopt the pet interests of the wealthy people who keep birding and DEI in the news. Upset about the mismanagement of your neighborhood? Get out there and bird watch!

That’s right: This is not the first time DEI has come for the birding world. In 2020, shortly after a confrontation between a black bird watcher and a white woman in Central Park made international news, the Associated Press ran a breathless report on the scourge of systemic racism in the birding community. CNN jumped in with an article entitled “The realities of being a black bird watcher.”

More recently, the American Ornithological Society (AOS) announced it will get rid of human-related bird names after some activists complained about some birds being named after individuals connected to racism and slavery.

“We could decide right now that the words we use matter, and that birds should carry their own history, not ours,” an op-ed in the Washington Post advocated back in August 2020.

‘Trump Is Hitler’ No Longer Goes Far Enough 

That the Times has made space in its pages for bird equity is a shock given the alarms progressives have raised in recent weeks about the alleged dangers of a second Trump term.

Former Democratic senator Claire McCaskill went so far as to suggest Trump is somehow “more dangerous” than Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini because he lacks their aspirations for world domination.

“A lot of people have tried to draw similarities between Mussolini and Hitler and the use of the terminology like ‘vermin’ and the drive that those men had towards autocracy and dictatorship,” McCaskill said during an appearance on MSNBC last week.

“The difference, though, I think makes Donald Trump even more dangerous, and that is he has no philosophy he believes in. He is not trying to expand the boundaries of the United States of America,” she added.

“He is not trying to overcome a neighboring country like Putin is in Ukraine. He is not going for a grandiose scheme of international dominance. All he wants is to look in the mirror and see a guy who is president. All he cares about is selfish self-promotion. That’s the only philosophy he has,” McCaskill concluded.

Liberals acted as if the sky was falling when Univision aired an interview with the former president earlier this month.

On Saturday, Univision anchor Jorge Ramos said it is “very dangerous to fail to confront Trump.”

“I believe we must question and confront Trump for democracy, for the rights of immigrants and, simply, for good journalism,” said Ramos, whom Trump kicked out of a campaign event in 2015.

The View co-host Ana Navarro called for Latinos “to hold Univision accountable.” Actor John Leguizamo called on “all my brothers and sisters who are actors, artists, politicians, activists to not go on Univision.”

He later said during an appearance on the Daily Show that there is “nothing wrong with Univision interviewing Trump,” but that the network failed to “confront” him.

“I thought it would be a dope opportunity to confront him on his hardline anti-Latino policies,” he said. “But instead of an interview worthy of Univision, we saw this caca mierda.”

Headline Fail of the Week

Not to be outdone by the New York Times hard hitting bird reporting, the BBC brings readers this headline: “Black women most likely to die in medieval London plague.”

“Race, Population Affinity, and Mortality Risk during the Second Plague Pandemic in Fourteenth-Century London, England,” the study on which the article is based, is set to be published by Bioarcheology International and is the “first archaeological exploration of race, gender and social standing influencing a person’s risk of death, during what was known as the Great Pestilence or Great Mortality.”

The study is based on 145 individuals from three cemeteries, while the pandemic is believed to have killed 35,000 Londoners.

The report was given a community note on X: “DNA was not used to determine race of the individuals. The claim they were black was based on the shape of their skulls. See link below. Only 3 of the ostensible black women died of plague. All 3 were buried in the same cemetery indicating close proximity in prior residence.”

Media Misses

• A Washington Post report on X attempted to dispute “online rumors” that “claimed the perpetrator of a stabbing attack was an immigrant.”

“The BBC found that the man was an Irish citizen who had lived in the country for 20 years. Police blamed a ‘lunatic faction driven by a far-right ideology’ for the riot in Dublin,” the outlet wrote in reporting about riots that broke out after the stabbing in Dublin. The story was awarded a community note on X: “The man is indeed an immigrant, as he was originally from Algeria. The WaPo segment appears to conflate citizenship with not being an immigrant, and you can be both.”

• Animal rights group PETA earned its own community notes tag on X last week over an unusual post that featured an illustration of a family of turkeys sitting around a human positioned like a turkey on a table. “We’re lucky turkeys would never do this to us—you don’t have to do it to them, either,” the group captioned the photo.

“Turkeys are not vegetarians,” the community note said. “Turkeys eat mice, lizards, frogs, and just about anything they can fit in their mouth. If turkeys were larger or had the technological means to farm and eat humans, their current diet reveals they likely would.”

• Sky News interviewer Kay Burley left Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy speechless when she suggested that the uneven numbers of Palestinian prisoners to Israeli hostages represented a difference in the value of their lives.

“I was speaking to a hostage negotiator this morning. He made the comparison between the 50 hostages that Hamas promised to release, as opposed to the 150 prisoners that are Palestinians that Israel has said that it will release,” Burley said. “And he made the comparison between the numbers and the fact that does Israel not think Palestinian lives are valued as highly as Israeli lives?”

Shock flashed across Levy’s face. “That is an astonishing accusation,” he replied in what became a viral moment. “If we could release one prisoner for every one hostage, we would obviously do that. We are operating in horrific circumstances.” He went on to note that Palestinian prisoners who were eligible for release included criminals convicted of violent attacks, whereas the hostages were innocent civilians.

“Notice the question of proportionality doesn’t interest Palestinian supporters when they are able to get more of their prisoners out,” he said. “It is outrageous to suggest that the fact that we are willing to release prisoners who are convicted of terrorism offenses, more of them than we are getting our own innocent children back, somehow suggests that we don’t care about Palestinian lives? Really, that’s a disgusting accusation.”