Has crime gotten worse in your neighborhood? That depends on which party you belong to:
Among both parties, fear of crime rose after 9/11. After that, fear of crime among Democrats steadily declined over the next 15 years.
But Republicans showed an entirely different response. When Barack Obama was elected president, fear of crime spiked 13 points. When Donald Trump was elected, fear of crime plummeted 18 points. Finally, when Joe Biden was elected, fear of crime once again spiked, this time by 29 points.
Needless to say, the actual amount of crime doesn't change much over the course of a single year. So why are Republicans convinced that it does?
Do I have to say it? Or is the answer obvious by now? This has nothing to do with actual levels of crime. It has nothing to do with crime policy, which is mostly local anyway. It has nothing to do with protest marches or Ferguson or anything else in far distant cities.
It's because of Fox News, which pushes the crime button whenever a Democrat is president and releases it whenever a Republican is president. That's it. That's all there is to it.
We really are a pathetic country. Faux as news. Good heavens. Should be called yellow tabloids. How can sane folks take in this stuff. Don't answer. We all know. Critical thinking challenged folks.
Hey, I know what I'm talking' about cuz I did research.
Yes, of course, partisan media will always try to excite their core audience: Fox News is particularly guilty on this front.
However, as a Democrat, I must admit that a lot of the Rachel Maddow coverage of, for example, the 'Trump dossier' was equally titled.
Media company's want viewers and ad revenue: telling your audience horrible thing about the other side, is a proven business model.
Nonstop network coverage about crime in a handful of cities does not equal a single TV show host pointing out attempts to destroy or overthrow the national government. First, the country can survive its cities becoming violent hellholes - we survived the 1970s-1990s after all - but it cannot survive a destroyed or overthrown national government. Secondly, Rachel Maddow is one person... even if she's spending 100% of her airtime pointing out the threats posed to the national government, it's nowhere close to the nearly 24/7/365 coverage given to "rampant" crime in Chicago, Portland, etc. by virtually all Fox News/OAN hosts.
"Rachel Maddow coverage of, for example, the 'Trump dossier' was equally titled."
I think you mean "tilted," but regardless, you can't actually be comparing the two, can you? Maddow is a journalist whose unapologetic mission is to bring to the attention of her audience the wrongs of the right and the facts to support her liberal outlook. That's ok. It's been going on for a lot longer than since Thomas Paine took up pamphleteering. More important, she tries pretty assiduously to stick to the truth, as far as it is known. She's not above speculating, but it's clearly called out.
Fox, on the other hand, is a NETWORK, and it advertises itself as "fair and balanced" and a legitimate news source (with the implied "versus the fake news liberal media." In fact, though, unlike traditional media, Fox actually leads with it's opinion pages, as it were, where they give free rein to make shit up and do - all the time. The "news" is window dressing. It's not just advocacy (as you see in MSNBC) but unadulterated propaganda.
Republicans campaign on nothing anymore but hate and fear.
Which, unfortunately, is usually more than enough to get them elected, so ...
Of course, Republicans see more crime. They see walking while black, driving while black, abortions after the first month, pornographic books in the schools, secret cabals eating babies, large scale plots to deprive us of our freedoms, rampant election fraud, a large-scale effort to force them to take a useless and dangerous vaccine to protect against an imaginary pandemic, takeover of the political opposition either by Communists or Nazi's or both, and on and on and on and on . . .
+1
Seems like there must be opposite items where CNN pushes buttons too.
Inquiring minds want to know this too!
The data that Kevin shows do not justify the conclusion that BLM protests did not influence perception of crime. There was plenty of media footage showing rioting and in some cases looting. There were also cases of people in rural areas and small towns forming armed vigilante bands to protect themselves from the local BLM activities, which were often a few people in discussions, not even marches. There was clearly a fantasy that people from the inner cities were coming to their towns. Of course this affected Republicans and Independents more than Democrats. What may have been especially damaging to the BLM movement and Democrats is the reaction of Independents. The CIVIQS poll
https://civiqs.com/results/black_lives_matter?uncertainty=true&annotations=true&zoomIn=true
shows that Independents' reaction was mostly negative. A lot of people switched from "no opinion" to unfavorable. Swing voters are probably not inclined to heed arguments about whether the police or the protesters caused the violence - they just see lawlessness. People saw this on the MSM, not just Fox News, though obviously Fox News dictated the reaction among the diehard Republicans.
Imo "independents" is mostly a mix of fairly strong partisans who like to say they aren't to poll takers. So the results of polling them tends to be some kind of average of the two party categories and rarely actually tells you anything new.
I agree, and so does a lot of political-science research.
Yes! There's not a huge mushy middle, there's an infinitesimally tiny mushy middle of non voters.
I think FQX News is a big contributor, but I’d also mention applications like Nextdoor. In the past, if there was a burglary or catalytic converter theft a few blocks away I’d be totally oblivious. Nowadays, I’m aware of every random vehicle window smash or suspicious person sighting within miles. And whenever there is a posting of something like that lots of people chime in on their own experiences and how bad things are getting nowadays. It definitely gives one the idea that there is a crime surge.
Yep it really distorts one's idea of neighborhood safety. But in my neighbor hood there are folks trying to push back against this idea to give folks a better perspective.
The local TV news also has a role in this.
According to the New York Post, walking around Manhattan right now is basically like strolling down the streets of Fallujah in 2004. Haven't been there in a while, so who's to say?
We have a problem in the U.S.: The Fox network. I agree with Kevin on this, but I want to emphasize something that I don't see getting much discussion. We all like to talk about how bad the deliberate misinformation practice on Faux News is, but there is an aspect that is worse: the degree to which the Fox Channel has established a monopoly on pushing ideas in all of those red counties and even in purple areas.
Yesterday I was watching progressive commentary and they were talking about how important it is for Dems to "get out there and sell the benefits" of the infrastructure bill that was just passed. Excellent point and good suggestions. Then I thought about and said to myself: How are they going to reach the persuadable Independents and moderate R's? Don't most of them get their "information" from the Fox channel? Dems can come up with the greatest talking strategy in the world and most of the voters that need to hear it never will.
For years I used to go to an annual hobby convention in mid PA. The TV in the lobbies of the hotels and motels? Fox all day long. I'd be willing to bet money that in a vast majority of the hotels and motels anywhere in the US outside of solid blue areas, they do the same thing. Why do they do it? Because the ratings show them that's the most "popular" with the general population. They want to please their customers.
Can anyone suggest a way to break this info monopoly? Because I think getting access to deliver messages consistently and repeatedly is at least as important as crafting the message in a way that it can resonate with lots of moderate voters.
The thing is, crime actually is up in my neighborhood compared to the last 20 years I have lived here. As a daily reader of the local city newspaper and the crime blotter in the neighborhood free paper, it's pretty clear that crime has been up for a while across my city.
It started with nuisance crimes in my neighborhood. Lots of catalytic converter thefts. My house got paintballed. Those sorts of things rise and fall routinely. But then there were the shocking murders along the nearby retail street. It's technically the neighborhood next to mine, but we are frequently over there. 5 murders in the last three months, in a neighborhood that usually has a murder every year or two. One involved a quadruple homicide where the murderer drove the bodies through my neighborhood for several hours. The other was part of a mass shooting. Carjackings are also happening in places where we used to just worry about purse snatching.
On top of that, I've known more people who have been victims of crimes in the last year than in a typical year. They are also more likely to involve physical assault, instead of just property crime.
There are some places that are not doing well in terms of crime. Maybe really low level crimes are down, but I'd rather have a dozen cars broken into for the spare change (common crime in my neighborhood a decade ago) than a single carjacking (which is suddenly happening here in the last year).
i also wonder to what degree republican poll takers just consciously lie to promote negative polling results when a dem is president.
Let's say you were a Fox News watcher/hardcore conservative living in a Chicago, Seattle or Portland. You see the same thing about crime on the streets day after day after day. Who are you supposed to turn to to fix things, hmm, since the Dems basically run these cities and have been for a long time and the only opposition is the Greens or the DSA?
And that's where the joke's on this fellow. Because the whole point of Fox News isn't to find a solution to crime in the streets, it's to make you upset about it day after day after day. And even if there was a solution, and even if the Republicans hand't abandoned the big cities (which the rest of the media, so obsessed they are with the Democrats' performance in the rural areas, never call them on), they'd never act on because that would take away the outrage. And where's the fun in that?