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Media Muddled Midterms by Simplifying Crime's Complexities Ari Paul ([link removed])


Election Focus 2022 Fearmongering about crime in Democratic states and cities was certainly central to the Republican Party’s midterm elections strategy (Vox, 11/3/22 ([link removed]) ), although at this point it is hard to say how effective it was.

As of this writing, Republicans look likely but not guaranteed ([link removed]) to take control of the House of Representatives ([link removed]) ; the fate of the Senate ([link removed]) is still anyone's guess. Several governors' races ([link removed]) remain to be called, but so far Democrats have seen a net gain of two, aided by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul successfully fending off a surprisingly challenging run by Rep. Lee Zeldin, a Trumpian election denier (MSNBC, 10/27/22
([link removed]) ).

What is certain is that the Republican obsession with crime received major attention in the media, and the subject was not always handled with the proper context, often tipping the balance to the conservative partisan narrative.

Part of this is historical: Republicans—fans of heavy-handed policing and long prison sentences—love to paint Democrats and their bleeding-heart liberalism for allowing criminals to run amok, an electoral blueprint that goes back at least to Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign (AP, 8/27/20 ([link removed]) ). Republicans have also driven a pro-police platform specifically against the Black Lives Matter uprising of the summer of 2020, which popularized the expression “defund the police” (CNN, 10/23/22 ([link removed]) ).


** 'Decades-long lows'
------------------------------------------------------------
Violent crime rate by year

Violent crime rates are much closer to the trough reached in 2014 than they are to the peak hit in 1991. (Statista ([link removed]) ).

Has crime increased nationally while Democrats controlled the White House and Congress? According to the FBI’s report ([link removed]) on crime statistics, the answer is complicated: “Overall violent crime volume decreased 1.0% for the nation from 1,326,600 in 2020 to 1,313,200 in 2021, which was up 5.6% from 2019.” In other words, in the one year we have data on since Democrats took over the White House and both houses of Congress, violent crime has gone down slightly.

Meanwhile, the “number of murders increased from 22,000 in 2020 to 22,900 in 2021,” thus signifying an “increase of 4.3% on top of the 29.4% increase in 2020”—so homicides have increased, but at a slower rate than before 2020's Democratic victory.

The Marshall Project (11/5/22 ([link removed]) ) put these recent shifts in historical context: "Since the 1990s, both violent and property crime reported to the police and estimated by survey research have declined.” It added that while “the violent crime rate increased slightly since the pandemic, it's a little more than half what it was three decades ago."

New York City, often depicted in the local and national media as the US equivalent of Beirut in the 1980s, has had a recent crime increase since the pandemic began, but this “obscures the fact that crime is still at decades-long lows” (Bloomberg, 7/29/22 ([link removed]) ).

Crime is also not a Democratic problem, as the Brennan Center (7/12/22 ([link removed]) ) noted:

Despite politicized claims that this rise was the result of criminal justice reform in liberal-leaning jurisdictions, murders rose roughly equally in cities run by Republicans and cities run by Democrats.

Looking at the geographic distribution of crime also muddies the Republican image: Eight of the ten states ([link removed]) with the highest murder rates voted for Trump in 2020, and in fact none of those eight have voted for a Democrat for president in the current century.


** 'Crime doesn't feel complex'
------------------------------------------------------------

Of course, the realities of crime data never stopped Republicans from painting Democrats as soft on crime, or blaming crime spikes—real or imaginary—on Democratic policies. In 2022, rather than combating such distortions, various media helped to amplify a simplistic depiction, becoming de facto propaganda arms for the Republican campaigns.
Yahoo: How Crime Came to Haunt the Democrats

Democrats were haunted not so much by crime as by corporate media misrepresentations of crime (Yahoo News, 11/7/22 ([link removed]) ).

Yahoo News (11/7/22 ([link removed]) ) noted that while murders and rapes are down in 2022, aggravated assault and robbery are up, acknowledging a complex picture of crime. But Yahoo added, “Crime doesn’t necessarily feel complex to voters.” It said this perception has

benefited Republicans, who have been pressing crime as an issue for months, assailing Democrats for their supposed lack of empathy for both police officers and the victims of violent crime.

The idea is that Democrats are to blame not for the reality of crime, but for failing to comfort voter perceptions—an impossible expectation.

The New York Times (10/25/22 ([link removed]) ), covering the governor’s race in New York, noted that while the truth about crime is “nuanced,” a

rash of highly visible, violent episodes, especially on the New York City subways, in recent months have left many New Yorkers with at least the perception that parts of the state are growing markedly less safe.

Ignore for a moment that the New York City mayor, not the governor in Albany, commands the city’s police department: This is another example of media suggesting that the myth of crime is as important as the actual numbers.

The Washington Post (10/26/22 ([link removed]) ) studied the degree to which three major TV networks—CNN, Fox News and MSNBC—have driven this narrative. “Through July and August, all three networks were mentioning crime about as much as they did in the first half of the year,” the paper's Philip Bump ([link removed]) said. But by September, “mentions on Fox News began to soar,” and a month later, “mentions began to rise on CNN and MSNBC, too, in part as a reflection of the increased discussion of crime on the campaign trail.”


** 'The grim reality'
------------------------------------------------------------
Fox: MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle clashes with Gov. Kathy Hochul over crime in New York: 'We don't feel safe'

When other outlets pick up on Fox News' politicized obsession with crime, Fox (11/6/22 ([link removed]) ) trumpets that as proof that its fearmongering was reality-based.

This impact of right-wing, self-consciously political media on more centrist corporate media can be seen in individual reports. MSNBC (11/5/22 ([link removed]) ) had a one-on-one interview with Hochul that focused heavily on her Trump-backed opponent’s obsession with the perception of rising crime. Immediately, this became fodder for the conservative media organs. Fox News (11/6/22 ([link removed]) ) gloated, “MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle Clashes With Gov. Kathy Hochul Over Crime in New York: ‘We Don’t Feel Safe.’” The New York Post (11/5/22 ([link removed]) ) and Newsweek (11/6/22 ([link removed]) ) boosted the interview as well. Thus
an ostensibly "liberal" ([link removed]) network can effectively create news content for conservative competitors, but also allow conservatives to say, “See? Even the liberal media believe crime is out of control.”

In New York, the Rupert Murdoch–owned media worked tirelessly to sully Hochul’s record on crime. In a particularly comical and incestuous example, a Wall Street Journal (10/24/22 ([link removed]) ) editorial scoffed at Hochul’s anti-crime record, counseling that in order to learn about “the grim reality, read the New York Post”—a sensational tabloid Murdoch also owns—“where America’s hardest-working police reporters cover America’s hardest-working criminals.”

The suggestion from the Journal, supposedly the most serious of Murdoch’s outlets, is that truth shouldn’t be found from facts and data, but anecdotes from its hard-right sister publication. If you don't get your news from tabloid headlines, you may be aware that New York City's criminals are actually underachievers, resulting in a homicide rate ([link removed]) that ranks 80th out of the US's 100 largest cities.

The New York Post, in addition to constant crime coverage, portrayed Zeldin’s crime platform as ecumenical, gaining support from both ultra-religious Jews (11/1/22 ([link removed]) ) to a busker known as the Naked Cowboy (11/2/22 ([link removed]) ). Unsurprisingly, the Post (10/28/22 ([link removed]) ) endorsed the Republican, citing crime as a reason.

Botching the truth and failing to provide context, the Post (10/30/22 ([link removed]) ) reported that in support of Zeldin,

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blasted New York Democrats for "coddling" criminals…and blamed their leadership for sending residents packing for the Sunshine State.

One problem: The homicide rate ([link removed]) in Republican-led Florida (7.8 per 100,000 people) is higher than it is in Democratic New York (4.7).


** 'Stories of stabbings'
------------------------------------------------------------

But you don't have to be Murdoch-owned to distort the crime story. In an otherwise insightful and well-reported story about Ronald Lauder’s enormous financial support to Zeldin, the New York Times (11/6/22 ([link removed]) ) said that Zeldin’s impressive polling was partly due to “rising crime,” that Lauder feared “crime is driving people from the city,” and that Republicans “tie Ms. Hochul to a rise in crime”—not clarifying that statistics about the city’s crime rates paint a complex and mixed picture (AP, 2/1/22 ([link removed]) ), one that doesn't support a conservative agenda ([link removed]) . Only after several of these references did the report finally say that pro-Zeldin messaging included “context-free claims about crime.”
AP: Zeldin’s crime message resonates in New York governor’s race

Corporate media almost never admit that voters' perceptions of how much crime there is depends on how much crime they've been shown by media--and that's what determines whether a "crime message resonates" (AP, 10/25/22 ([link removed]) ).

A number of major media outlets have occasionally tried to paint a more complicated picture of crime concerns, noting that much of the fear is driven by Republican propaganda and feelings about crime rather than data (Reuters, 11/1/22 ([link removed]) ; NPR, 11/3/22 ([link removed]) ; New York Times, 11/3/22 ([link removed]) ; Atlantic, 11/8/22 ([link removed]) ). But day-to-day political coverage still presents tales of rising crime as fact, as when AP (10/25/22 ([link removed]) ) said that Zeldin’s anti-crime message resonated with voters as he “spent much of the year railing
against a streak of shootings and other violent crimes, including a series of unprovoked attacks on New York City subways,” and “lamented stories of stabbings, people being shoved onto the tracks by strangers….” The AP did mention that the “reality” of crime rates is “often more nuanced,” but included these complicating details farther down in the story.

Newsweek’s editor-in-chief, Jonathan Tobin (10/4/22 ([link removed]) ), gloated that a recent crime spike would be good for Republican Pennsylvania Senate candidate Mehmet Oz. (Tobin is a former executive editor of Commentary ([link removed]) , a neoconservative magazine.) In Georgia, Politico (10/30/22 ([link removed]) ) editorialized in a news piece that incumbent Republican Gov. Brian Kemp “linked” his challenger, Stacey Abrams, “to the now politically toxic ‘defund the police’ movement.”

Crime is like war. It’s an absolutely necessary subject for media to cover but, as in war, truth is often the first casualty. Shocking images and details of incidents often overshadow facts, data and history. Partisans can quickly capitalize on that emotional simplicity, crafting narratives that fit their aims—a phenomenon that responsible journalists should try to counteract rather than facilitate.
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