Several major newsrooms owe their readers a retraction.

Media outlets fell over each other this year to promote a study purportedly showing that counties that hosted Trump 2016 campaign rallies later experienced a 226% increase in hate crimes.

The study has been thoroughly debunked this week, leaving several news organizations with egg on their face. As it turns out, uncritically parroting the findings of an unpublished study that conforms perfectly to specific political biases is apparently a dangerous gamble for ostensibly serious news organizations.

A March 22 Washington Post analysis written by the study's authors claimed in its headline, “Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes.”

"Hate crimes rose by 226 percent in counties where Trump hosted campaign rallies in 2016: study," read the headline to a March 23 story published by the Hill.

Business Insider reported, "Hate crimes increased 226% in places Trump held a campaign rally in 2016, study claims."

Later, after a gunman on Aug. 3 murdered 22 people in El Paso, Texas, some newsrooms sought to blame the mass casualty event on the president, citing specifically the hate crime study.

“Why Trump can't lead the war against white supremacy,” read the headline to a CNN article that cited the Post’s March 22 report.

A few days later, on Aug. 7, the Associated Press published a story titled, “Trump words linked to more hate crime? Some experts think so.” Like every other story mentioned in the above, it claimed a study had found that “counties that hosted a 2016 Trump campaign rally saw a 226% increase in reported hate incidents over comparable counties that did not host such a rally.”

The only problem with these reports is that the cited study is trash. That's the finding of an article published this week by Reason magazine.

“Using the same data and statistical procedures … we replicated their study's headline result,” write contributing authors and Harvard University Ph.D. candidates Matthew Lilley and Brian Wheaton. “Since we did not have access to the original paper's data and code, this involved collecting each of the variables mentioned in the original paper, and then independently performing the same analysis. Wherever possible, we copied the decisions that are mentioned in the original paper. Our headline results were very close to those reported in the original paper.”

They add, “Using additional data we collected, we also analyzed the effect of Hillary Clinton's campaign rallies using the identical statistical framework. The ostensible finding: Clinton rallies contribute to an even greater increase in hate incidents than Trump rallies.”

This raises the obvious question: If Trump’s rhetoric and style caused a spike in hate crimes in counties that hosted his rallies, as the original study would have us believe, then what explains Lilley and Wheaton's findings that Clinton rallies created an even greater spike in hate incidents? Are we to believe the former secretary of state was even more incendiary than the Queens businessman? Certainly not. As it turns out, you do not need to answer the question. Wheaton and Lilley kept digging into the data. If you can believe it, it actually gets worse for the original study’s authors.

Lilley and Wheaton write:

Both of these results rely on comparing counties with rallies to other counties without them. This produces a glaring problem. Politicians tend to hold political rallies near where large numbers of people live. And in places with more people, the raw number of crimes is generally mechanically higher. Simply put, no one should be surprised that Orange County, California (population 3.19 million) was home to both more reported hate incidents (5) and Trump rallies (2) than Orange County, Indiana (population 19,840, which had zero of each).

In even plainer terms, the supposed effects of Trump and Clinton's rallies go to basically zero when you account for county population, political scientist and FiveThirtyEight contributor Matt Grossman helpfully notes.

Lilley and Wheaton conclude:

Nor is it sensible to interpret that one of these differences (hate crimes) is caused by the other (political rallies). Indeed, adding a simple statistical control for county population to the original analysis causes the estimated effect of Trump rallies on reported hate incidents to become statistically indistinguishable from zero.

The hate crime study is flat wrong, as even the most basic scrutiny shows. Yet the nation’s largest and most powerful newsrooms ran with its supposed conclusions anyway. The least they can do now is retract their flawed stories. But I am not going to hold my breath.