Media in Hiding From the Most Urgent Questions of the Day

Janine Jackson

Common Dreams (8/12/25) noted that "many Americans are persuaded by persistent claims that crime is rising, even when they are not."

Trump has commandeered Washington, DC, putting National Guard and local police in the streets because DC is not a state, and so it's the only place he could take over in this way. He's brandishing a patently false pretense that the district is facing a crime crisis. The reality—and we do remember reality, right?—is that Washington, DC, has its lowest violent crime rate in 30 years.

Stephen Prager at Common Dreams (8/12/25) pulled more stats together: Los Angeles's Police Department says violent crime of all sorts there is on the decline, with the city looking at the lowest number of killings in 60 years. Baltimore has a historically low homicide rate, down 28% from last year, violent crime down by 17%, property crime down by 13%. Chicago has fewer homicides than in any year in the past decade, a 30% decline in shootings and homicides from last year. And New York has experienced the lowest number of murders in recorded history.

So how do you explain this to people? Well, if you're the Associated Press (8/12/25), you lead with dryly stating that Trump

has taken control of DC's law enforcement and ordered National Guard troops to deploy onto the streets of the nation's capital, arguing the extraordinary moves are necessary to curb an urgent public safety crisis.

Even while critiquing Trump's rhetoric ("Conservatives have for generations used denigrating language to describe the condition of major cities"), AP (8/12/25) allows that rhetoric to frame the reality. (Trump says "the extraordinary moves are necessary to curb an urgent public safety crisis.")

The very next sentence read:

Even as district officials questioned the claims underlying his emergency declaration, the Republican president promised a "historic action to rescue our nation's capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.”

So you relegate reality to a dependent clause, and then recite the inflammatory hysteria word for word.

If you, like AP, are respectable corporate media, responsible for explaining the situation to people, you further note:

According to White House officials, troops will be deployed to protect federal assets and facilitate a safe environment for law enforcement to make arrests. The Trump administration believes the highly visible presence of law enforcement will deter violent crime. It is unclear how the administration defines providing a safe environment for law enforcement to conduct arrests, raising alarm bells for some advocates.

So you get that, independent reporters under fascism? Lead with White House officials, and recite the claim that they're "facilitating a safe environment for law enforcement to make arrests." That sounds very calm, very measured, and you're not even asking, “What arrests?” The brown children snatched off the street by goons who won't show their ID? Those are the arrests that need a safe environment?

And, OK, alarm bells are being raised for "some advocates"? Advocates of what? Democracy, due process, human decency? Why aren't those alarmed advocates in the lead paragraph?

When Stephen Miller (X, 8/12/25) asserts that "the real rates of crime" in big cities are "orders of magnitude higher," he's claiming that rather than having 187 murders last year, DC really had more than 18,000.

Corporate media are calling this kind of thing reporting, but reporting would keep at least one foot on the facts. So when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller (X, 8/12/25) tweets that “crime stats in big blue cities are fake,” would a press corps worth its salt say “some advocates dispute that,” or would they show all the actual real-world data?

Ideally, the blathering of a man who thinks that “the real rates of crime, chaos and dysfunction are orders of magnitude higher than that” might be met with questions about, for one thing, whether he knows what “orders of magnitude” means, but also, where is he looking for these official rates of "chaos and dysfunction"?

But the press corps we have are engaged, like the New York Times, in hiding from the most urgent questions of the day. Faced, for example, with Israel's deliberate, acknowledged, intentional starvation of Palestinians and occupied territories, the Times musters itself to a story (7/20/25) about how the question of whether that's happening at all is “dividing Jewish Americans.”

Nowhere does this news report say that international rights groups and statements from the Israeli leadership themselves say that, yes, starvation is happening, on purpose; for the paper's readers, "yes" and "no" are equally credible alternatives. Elite journalists, faced with historically horrific crimes, seem to define their job as pretending not to know what's going on. Reality evidently needs to be balanced with falsehoods.

What's going on, as readers will know, is that, for example, the team of Al Jazeera reporters working from Gaza have all been killed. Al Jazeera correspondents Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh, along with cameramen Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal, were all killed in an Israeli strike targeting their marked news media tent in Gaza City. All of which is simply to say, look up independent news sources for information, now more than ever.