When CNN and the Washington Post began publicizing a study by the libertarian CATO Institute that portrayed terrorism by refugees as a remote danger to Americans, it was predictable that some would start misquoting the findings, making it sound like an even more remote possibility than the study actually claimed.
As previously documented by NewsBusters, instead of examining the question most likely on people's minds as to how likely it is that at least some embedded terrorists would infiltrate a certain number of refugees and then go on to commit acts of terrorism in the U.S. -- which would likely be in the neighborhood of 90 percent since such acts of terrorism have already happened -- the study instead calculated the odds that a particular person would be killed by a terrorist attack, placing the probability at one in 3.8 billion. Or, in other words, any terrorist attack would mostly likely happen to someone else other than you, so the chance that you personally would be the one killed is tiny.
On Sunday's Face the Nation, CBS host John Dickerson made the predictable mistake of claiming that there was only a one in three billion chance of a refugee committing a terrorist attack, and alluded to critics who call the Trump administration's travel ban "a solution for a problem that doesn't exist."
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During the roundtable segment, after conservative commentator Ramesh Ponnuru suggested that there are problems with the travel ban, Dickerson misleadingly responded: "And the CATO Institute has looked into the actual terrorism as a result of refugees and found, I think the chance that a refugee will -- they put at something like three point something billion that a refugee would commit terrorism. So this is a solution for a problem that doesn't exist, say some."
