One of the ways that media outlets signal their sympathy is by treating the numerical claims of liberal activist groups as the hardest data worth having. This week’s Newsweek does it in back-to-back social-issue stories. In their Paul Hill article, reporter Arian Campo-Flores reports:

According to Vicki Saporta of the pro-choice National Abortion Federation, violence against clinics typically increases in the months following an extremist’s conviction….Until now, most had assumed that the abortion battle’s bloodiest days had passed. After the 1998 killing of an abortion doctor (there have been seven abortion-related murders and 17 attempted ones so far, according to Saporta), Attorney General Janet Reno established a task force to combat such violence, and it abated.

Of course, the most glaring bias in this story (as in almost every other story on “anti-abortion violence” in the last decade) is that most “abortion-related murders” are actually the abortions performed inside the clinics.

On the next page, reporter Holly Bailey makes a national story out of the small trend of D.C. deaths of “transgenders,” a most vague and politically correct term. Bailey also uses the lifestyle-left numbers as gospel:

The unsolved killings have enraged the “trans” community, whose members call Washington a “deathtrap for the transgendered” and accuse police of giving the cases short shrift. (Nationwide, nine other transgenders have been murdered in the past 12 months, according to Remembering Our Dead, a San Francisco-based activist group.)

A modest request: Is it too much to ask that when the numbers are tiny (seven abortion-related murders or nine “transgender” murders), that Newsweek invest an hour or two in confirming the seven or nine for themselves instead of automatically accepting activist claims?