Sometimes an ethics story defies my ability to devise an appropriate headline. The AP story “Black Lives Matter movement marks 10 years of activism and renews its call to defund the police” is a prime example. The story is even worse than the headline (“activism” is a deceitful and deceptive euphemism for violence, lies, divisiveness and fraud), with the once-trustworthy news organization displaying the worst of U.S. journalism’s ethics rot.

The scam that is Black Lives Matter has done nothing but damage since its emergence in 2013, but to hear the AP tell it, this is a movement for Americans to honor. Let’s see…I haven’t checked yet, and I promise to reveal what I find: is the AP’s reporter who wrote this junk, Aaron Morrison, an African American?

Why yes, he is! What a coinkydink. This piece of propaganda could only have been written by a devoted supporter; the AP rigged the story. That’s American journalism in 2023.

Let me provide some highlights with commentary:

• “The Black Lives Matter movement hits a milestone on Thursday, marking 10 years since its 2013 founding in response to the acquittal of the man who fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.”

Yes, and it is beyond argument that its “response” was to exploit a local incident that had no racial implications whatsoever. That 2013 “founding” was based on a series of lies and misrepresentations and well as disgracefully biased reporting.

• “Gunned down in a Florida gated community where his father lived in 2012, Martin was one of the earliest symbols of a movement that now wields influence in politics, law enforcement and broader conversations about racial progress in and outside the U.S.”

Martin was not “gunned down.” He was, according to all available evidence, killed in self-defense after he attacked an over-zealous community watch volunteer who fired his gun when he feared he would be beaten to death by a larger assailant. The killer, George Zimmerman, was neither a police officer nor racially motivated, and he was acquitted because a prosecution that never should have taken place couldn’t prove its excessive charges at all, much less “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Those are relevant facts; that Martin was 17 and that his father lived where he was killed are not.

• “BLM activists and organizations plan to mark a decade of the movement with in-person and virtual events. Calls to action include a renewed push to defund police departments and reinvest in Black communities that have suffered disproportionately from police brutality, unequal treatment in criminal justice systems and mass incarceration.”

The insane “defund the police” movement has devastated multiple Democratic Party-run cities and led to crime waves that disproportionately harm black communities. It is accurate to describe BLM as taking the highly debatable position that “Black communities that have suffered disproportionately from police brutality, unequal treatment in criminal justice systems and mass incarceration,” but the AP is stating that as fact. It isn’t fact: it is the organization’s propaganda, and the Associated Press is parroting it.

• “In the wake of Supreme Court decisions that stymied relief from student loan debt held disproportionately by Black borrowers  and banned affirmative action in higher education, the need for BLM’s existence couldn’t be more clear, said prominent movement activist Melina Abdullah.”

That statement (which should have been in quotes, because otherwise it appears to be endorsed by the AP) dishonestly and misleadingly implies that both decisions were motivated by antipathy toward black Americans. Biden’s loan cancellation scheme was illegal, and would have been struck down if it only benefited white debters. Affirmative action was banned because it was irrefutably unconstitutional.

• “Festival organizers have invited Sybrina Fulton, Martin’s mother, to speak.”

Perfect. Fulton has squeezed every possible penny out of her son’s death, and giving her another opportunity to spread the fals narrative that Tryavon was “murdered”—as if she has any first hand knowledge of what occurred whatsover proves that BLM is still flogging its myth that Martin was just a kid “gunned down” by a racist “pseudo-cop.

• “Zimmerman claimed to authorities that he acted in self-defense when he shot Martin. He also acknowledged to an emergency dispatcher that he had followed and profiled the Black teen as a potential burglar in the Sanford, Florida, gated community. Martin’s encounter with Zimmerman, as well as the delay in arresting and charging the gunman in the killing, raised questions about how police handle suspected acts of vigilantism against Black victims. In 2012, former President Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black commander-in-chief, underscored public concerns over fairness in the case when he said: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Wow. A jury confirmed Zimmerman’s claims sufficiently to find him innocent, after the prosecution’s “star witness” revealed that Martin had planned on confronting Zimmerman. Since Zimmerman should not have been charged in the first place, the “delay” in charging and trying him represented no miscarriage of justice. Zimmerman did not “reveal that he had profiled the Black teen”—that part of the narrative came from a deceptively altered recording publicized by MSNBC. “Public concerns over fairness in the case” were entirely the product of inflammatory and false reporting and activist hype.

I particularly like the nod to “the first black President’s” irresponsible statement about the incident before he knew that facts. Ethics Alarms flagged Obama’s outburst as unconscionable at the time. “The first black President” shares substantial blame for the deterioration of race relations in the U.S. that he helped advance.

• “BLM co-founders Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Ayo Tometi — the three activists are credited with using the phrase as an affirmation and an organizing strategy — initially pledged to build a decentralized organization governed by the consensus… But just three years into its existence, all but one of the founders remained involved in the movement’s burgeoning organization. And in 2020, an unprecedented wave of donations to the movement following protests over George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police meant that BLM needed more infrastructure….”

Nowhere in the news story does the AP mention the rather significant details that most of the money BLM raised appears to have vanished into the ether of the pockets of its founders and officials.

• “The August 2014 shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri, helped the phrase “Black lives matter” become a potent rallying cry for progressives and a favorite target of derision for law enforcement unions and political conservatives.”

Unconscionable. “At the hands of police in Ferguson”? Brown was shot and killed by a single police officer after Brown tried to get the officer’s gun and was charging him with all of his 300 pound bulk. A grand jury exonerated him after evidence should that the “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” narrative was activist and media-driven fiction. The “potent rallying cry for progressives” is based on a lie that is still featured on the Black Lives Matter website.

Black Lives Matter has, in its ten years of existence, caused deaths, division, crime, riots and seemingly irreparable harm to U.S. race relations while enriching its leadership. None of this is even hinted at in the Associate Press “news story.”