Blake Neff of the Daily Caller documents a story that should embarrass most members of the media.

Look out, white male oppressors: Black women are now the most educated group in the country!

At least, that’s the surprising narrative being touted on Salon, The Root and a host of other news sites over the past week. Almost out of nowhere, they say, black women have blown past whites and Asians to become the most educated demographic group in America.

But the narrative is false, a fiction created entirely from a mangling of U.S. census data and an inability to read simple charts.

“By both race and gender there is a higher percentage of black women (9.7 percent) enrolled in college than any other group including Asian women (8.7 percent), white women (7.1 percent) and white men (6.1 percent), according to the 2011 U.S. Census Bureau,” Salon says in its write-up. …

… But while black women have made enormous educational strides in the last few decades, Salon, The Root, and the rest are all pushing a completely bogus narrative. Black women aren’t the country’s most educated group, and it isn’t particularly close.

Defining what makes a group the “most educated” isn’t a precise science, since there are many traits that could be used to measure a group’s education level. One could look at high school and college graduation rates (Asian women are currently tops in both), or how many Ph.Ds or other terminal degrees a group earns.

None of these measures are used by the news outlets declaring black women the country’s most educated group. Instead, the assertion is based on two observations: that a high number of black women are currently enrolled in college, and that black women dramatically outperform black men academically.

Both of these statements are perfectly true, or at least don’t contradict census data. But neither of them make black women the country’s most educated group.