Earlier: The Fulford File | Narrative Collapse, Fighting For Injustice, And The Importance Of VDARE.com

Edward Jay Epstein, who died recently at the age of 88, was in journalism long enough to have been part of a 1969 case of what we call Narrative Collapse, where the Left claims that whites, or the police, or the forces of Law and Order, et cetera, have committed some atrocity against someone innocent and unarmed, and it turns out to have been a total lie. as with the Trayvon Martin case, Michael Brown in Ferguson, or even more obviously, the Jussie Smollett case.

Here, from the 2014 Fulford File linked at the top of the page, is an early example of that. The Narrative was:

Police Genocide Against the Black Panthers: This is an old one—back in 1969, Charles R. Garry, white lawyer for the Black Panthers, told the press that 28 Panthers had been killed in clashes with the police. This was reported uncritically in both the NYT and the Washington Post [The Black Panther Toll Is Now 28, by John Kifner, NYT, December 7, 1969].

And the Collapse was:

Narrative Collapse: Edward Jay Epstein looked in to this in the New Yorker, and discovered (a) only 10 members of the Black Panthers had been shot by the police (rather than other Panthers) and (b) ”six of the ten Panthers were killed by seriously wounded policemen who clearly had reason to believe that their own lives were in jeopardy” [The Black Panthers and the Police: A Pattern of Genocide? New Yorker, February 13, 1971].

There's more Narrative Collapse in my old file, but that was Epstein’s.