One of the components of the selling of “believe the women” has been the effort to turn excuses for the same failures that apply in every accusation into virtues when it comes to rape and sexual assault accusations. This is nothing new. Nor is there anything new about the use of false statistics to perpetuate the claim that false rape accusations rarely occur.

And the New York Times, for maybe the thousandth time, repeats the same nonsense it’s been relying on for years. But what could have possibly compelled them to turn to Shaila Dewan to write this “news analysis” listicle?

There are all sorts of reasons women who report sexual misconduct, from unwanted advances by their bosses to groping or forced sex acts, are not believed, and with a steady drumbeat of new reports making headlines, the country is hearing a lot of them.

But some of the most commonly raised causes for doubt, like a long delay in reporting or a foggy recall of events, are the very hallmarks that experts say they would expect to see after a sexual assault.

Who is the “expert”?

Kimberly A. Lonsway, a psychologist who conducts law enforcement training on sexual assault as the research director of End Violence Against Women International.

They are also the very hallmarks of false accusations. The “expert” didn’t mention that to Dewan, I guess.

From what can be found of her background, Shaila Dewan is a journalist with no education or experience, no competencies, in criminal law, statistics, any substantive area remotely related to the subject of crime in general or sexual assault in particular. So why would she be assigned to write a ‘splainer on a subject about which she knows absolutely nothing?

Partly this is because of widespread misconceptions. The public and the police vastly overestimate the incidence of false reports: The most solid, case-by-case examinations say that only 5 to 7 percent of sexual assault reports are false. Responses to trauma that are often viewed as evidence of unreliability, such as paralysis or an inability to recall timelines, have been shown by neurobiological research to be not only legitimate, but common.

There is no attribution to an “expert” here. There are no links to the “neurobiological research.” And then there is the “5 to 7 percent” reports are false statistics, which isn’t even an accurate statement of the flagrantly inaccurate grasp of the statistics.  The numbers commonly used are 2 to 10%, which, using the law of big numbers, would reflect a massive number of false accusations.

But that too misses the mark. This reflects the accusations which are conclusively provable to be false, meaning susceptible to proof of the negative. There remains 58.8% of accusations which are inconclusive, so they aren’t squeezed into the “definitely false” category.

So Dewan may be an good writer but really bad with understanding statistics? She may be a good writer but have no clue that the same neurological issues arise in every situation that involves an unanticipated trauma, not just sexual assault? A good writer but totally unaware that the same hallmarks of truthfulness are the hallmarks of falsity? A good writer but clueless when it comes to distinguishing proof of the rape of a woman from robbery by a black man?

This isn’t to blame Dewan, who may well have been told to write this “news analysis” by her editor on a subject about which she was utterly ignorant. Sure, she could have done far better research in crafting her listicle so that her content was remotely accurate, rather than a rehash of the same crap the Times and advocates have been spewing for years to try to morph sexual assault against women into a different nature of crime than all other crimes.

And clearly there is nothing in this ‘splainer that the New York Times hasn’t reported over and over again, because if you keep reporting falsehoods, they eventually become true (meaning people believe them because the New York Times said so). And then there’s the “myth” scam, where the reporting purports to distinguish myths by calling myths truth.

Then again, Shaila Dewan could have told her editor that she’s completely unqualified to write about this subject. She could have refused to participate in the perpetuation of falsehoods, the spread of ignorance. Instead, she wrote her listicle, put her name to it, and made New York Times readers stupider.

Am I being unduly harsh to Shaila Dewan? To the New York Times? Perhaps, but not without reason. The solution to right-wing fake news isn’t left-wing fake news. It’s accurate news. It’s accurate analysis. No matter what your confirmation bias wants to read.