I have to say I agree with you on both counts. It would have been more accurate and neutral to write the headline as you suggest. (It would also have been longer and more boring.) Regarding your second point, a quick google search reveals that sex-related crimes encompass:
- Sexual Assault: Describes the catch-all crime that encompasses unwanted sexual touching of many kinds, with links to state penal code and federal law on related crimes. - Solicitation: It's illegal to entice someone else to commit a crime (such as prostitution). ... - Statutory Rape
I have no idea how the figures break down in these categories, so it's hard to the degree of unfairness being applied. If all of the 70K cases were rape, then Breitbart may actually be overly nice :) (Not saying it's likely!)
So thanks for that clarification. I would say, however, that this kind of headline is pretty typical for all news agencies. For example, during the Brexit "debate" in Britain, news outlets like BBC also quoted figures that were aggregated over a number of years to highlight the potential losses to the UK economy. Ditto the Daily Mail on the other side of the aisle. If this is the evidence that Breitbart is a shoddy news outlet, then I contend that the evidence is fairly weak.
They cite 70,000 sexual assaults from 1955-2010 and characterize it as a crisis. Yet, there are over 200,000 sexual assaults and rapes annually, and 80,000 sexual assaults in prisons alone annually. (https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem) If the 70,000 number was equally distributed, than 1,272 sexual assaults by criminal aliens would happen each year, which represents 0.006% of the total.
Is this a good thing? No. Is this some existential crisis where illegals are flooding over the border to rape american women? No.
Let's not dismiss what inaccuracy here can lead to: bigotry on false pretenses, violence against innocent immigrants, and blindly supporting wars against "the wrong kind of people."
"Criminal Aliens Arrested for Sex-Related Crimes 70,000 Times Between 1955 and 2010 — But Paul Ryan Targets Trump"
The original headline creates an emotional impact by implying certain things: that these 70,000 events are sexual assaults (not generic sex crimes like indecent exposure etc.) against women (implying a relationship with Trump's actions where none specifically exists) that happened recently (not during a 55-year period that ended six years ago). The headline with context doesn't have the same emotional impact because you can't make the same misleading inferences. Maybe these crimes are a problem, maybe they aren't, but either way this headline is a clear misrepresentation of the facts.