theissen, marc wa po
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MMA
08/27/26
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MMA
07/08/26 9:12 AM EDT
07/08/26
MMA
On January 6, 2021, as a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol and halted Congress’ counting of electoral votes, Fox News host Brian Kilmeade dashed off a desperate text to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
“Please, get him on TV. Destroying everything you have accomplished,” he wrote of Trump, who had summoned the enraged crowd to Washington, D.C., and incited it with lies that the 2020 election had been stolen as part of a plot to subvert that election.
Kilmeade expressed a drastically different view on Monday, as a new Congress prepared to count the electoral votes that would return Trump to the Oval Office.
In one of Fox & Friends’ few references to the January 6 insurrection that morning, he mocked Democrats who “want to point out how different” today’s events will be “from four years ago” when “democracy was in danger.”
Kilmeade added that the American people think that January 6, “as bad as that day was, it’s a small part of the Donald Trump story” and that it would be “put to bed even further after today happens.”
The Fox & Friends host is one of an array of right-wing media figures who said at the time that the January 6 insurrection was a calamity, that the rioters were criminals, and that Trump himself bore responsibility for their actions. But over the past four years, they have participated in the right’s Great Forgetting, making their peace with Trump’s attempted coup and supporting his return to the presidency.
- ### When the right said January 6 was “deplorable” and its participants “criminals”
“Remember what yesterday’s attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol was like. Very soon, someone might try to convince you that it was different,” The Atlantic’s David Graham wrote the next day. “The health of the republic depends both on what swift consequences come—for Trump and for others—and also on how people remember the participants’ actions later on.”
Graham’s warning proved prescient. As the attack unfolded and in its immediate aftermath, many media figures on the right joined those on center and left in condemning the attack — and Trump’s work to incite it — in the strongest possible terms. But they did not sustain their initial response.
“Shoot the protestors,” influential commentator Erick Erickson wrote that afternoon. He added that Trump should receive immediate consequences that would end his political career: “Waive the rules, impeach. Waive the rules, convict. Waive the rules, deny the ability to run for election again.”
Four years later, Erickson offered this take: “First, Happy January 6th to all who celebrate. Note to the media: The exit polling in November showed that most voters do not care. That you will try to make them care today is another reason trust in the media is beneath that of Congress itself.”
Fox chief political analyst Brit Hume likewise denounced Trump at the time for having “fueled the worst suspicions of his supporters with wild claims that the election was stolen. And now we see the result.” But on Election Day 2024, he declared this “a BS issue” because “the thing was over in a matter of hours.”
Erickson and Hume are among a long list of right-wing media notables who condemned January 6 — and even Trump for bringing it about — but came around to implicitly or explicitly support his return to the presidency, even as he showed no remorse for his own actions and valorized the rioters.
Rupert Murdoch, whose right-wing media empire is one of the most potent forces in Republican politics, wrote in an email to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott on Inauguration Day 2021 that Trump’s election lies had been “pretty much a crime” that made January 6 “inevitable.” He added: “Best we don't mention his name unless essential and certainly don't support him."
On Fox, numerous hosts condemned the criminal acts of the mob and said its members deserved punishment, with some even describing such denunciations as morally necessary.
“Those who truly support President Trump, those that believe they are part of the conservative movement in this country, you do not — we do not support those that commit acts of violence,” offered Fox host and Trump adviser Sean Hannity. “Every good and decent American, we know, will and must condemn what happened at the Capitol.”
“The actions at the United States Capitol three days ago were deplorable, reprehensible, outright criminal,” Jeanine Pirro likewise declared. “Anyone watching this must condemn it.”
Fox contributor Mark Thiessen was among the few to single out Trump on the network’s airwaves, saying the then-president had been “responsible for what happened,” and he went much further in a Washington Post column.
“It was one of the darkest moments in the history of our democracy. And Trump is responsible for it,” he wrote. “Trump formed and incited the mob. He stoked their anger with self-serving lies. He betrayed his followers. He betrayed his office. And now he has blood on his hands.”
The organs of the upper-crust right were united in blaming Trump for the attack.
Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal wrote in a January 7, 2021, editorial that Trump should resign the presidency after committing “an assault on the constitutional process of transferring power after an election.” The New York Post editorial board wrote that “while the roots of this madness were many, with some blame across the spectrum, it’s fundamentally on President Trump.” And the editors of National Review said Trump “found a new low” by having “whipped up and urged on a mob toward the U.S. Capitol, where it breached the building and forced his vice president and lawmakers to flee.”
The hosts of the All-In podcast, which became a key venue of the MAGA tech right, were even more scathing at the time, describing Trump as “a complete piece-of-shit fucking scumbag” who had engaged in “insane, deranged, criminal, lunatic behavior” and had “disqualified himself from being a candidate at a national level.”
- ### The Great Forgetting and what comes next
These comments reflected the widespread initial consensus that January 6 had been horrific — and that Trump had been responsible for it. In the first days following the attack, politicians of both parties, corporate leaders, and the public at large responded with revulsion and demands for consequences.
But that unity ultimately proved fragile. A coterie of Trumpists, led by former Fox host Tucker Carlson, worked diligently to unwind it, reframing the sacking of the U.S. Capitol as either unimportant — or a conspiracy driven by Democrats and the media in which the assailants were the real victims of a crackdown on “political dissidents,” as Fox’s Rachel Campos-Duffy put it last week.
As this fraudulent counternarrative became increasingly widespread, most other conservative media figures eventually chose to join the right’s Great Forgetting. They pretended that a president who they knew had tried to overturn the republic was fit to return to that office. And in so doing, they helped power Trump from his post-January 6 position of disgrace back to the GOP nomination and the presidency.
Trump’s return to office sets the stage for more authoritarian acts. He never repudiated his election lies or the attack they incited, instead valorizing the January 6 “hostages” and promising they will receive pardons as one of his first acts in office. And he is assembling a team to carry out the “retribution” he has promised to inflict on his political foes, including an FBI director who proposed legal action against the conspirators, “not just in government but in the media,” who he claimed “helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.”
Trump’s authoritarian impulses may ultimately come to nothing. But with their actions after January 6, the leading lights of the right have already signaled their willingness to accept whatever he does.
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01/06/21
They did it and will do it again – if no one stops them
07/22/22
05/21/24 MMA
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https://facultygov.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/261/2019/10/Mayer-article-on-Right-Wing-Billionaires.pdf
16 pp
How Right-Wing Billionaires Infiltrated Higher Education Chronicle Review
By Jane Mayer FEBRUARY 12, 2016
...The Olin foundation also backed what came to be known as the Collegiate Network, privately financing a string of right-wing newspapers on America’s college campuses. Among them was The Dartmouth Review, which infamously published an editorial in Ebonics proclaiming, "Now we be comin’ to Dartmut’ and be up over our ’fros in studies, but we still be not graduatin’ Phi Beta Kappa." The paper hosted a feast of lobster and champagne to mock a student fast against global hunger, sledgehammered shantytowns erected by students protesting apartheid in South Africa, and published a transcript of a secretly taped meeting of students belonging to Dartmouth’s gay student association. The Dartmouth Review became an incubator for right-wing media figures like D’Souza and the future conservative radio host Laura Ingraham. Its counterpart at Vassar, meanwhile, gave starts in journalism to the ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl and Marc Thiessen, an online columnist at The Washington Post best known for his defense of the Bush administration’s use of torture.
...
If the Olin foundation was less than transparent about its mission, it was not for the first time. Between 1958 and 1966, it secretly served as a bank for the Central Intelligence Agency. During these eight years, the CIA laundered $1.95 million through the foundation. Olin, according to Miller, regarded his undercover role as part of his patriotic duty. Many of the government funds went to anti-Communist intellectuals and publications. But in 1967, the press exposed the covert propaganda operation, triggering a political furor and causing the CIA to fold the program. The CIA money at the Olin foundation, which was not publicized at the time, disappeared as quietly as it had arrived. The idea of using the private foundation to fund ideologically aligned intellectuals, however, persisted. The Olin foundation invested in William F. Buckley Jr., whose television show, Firing Line, the foundation supported. It also funded Allan Bloom, author of the best-selling slam from the right at American higher education, The Closing of the American Mind (in which Bloom also lashed out at rock music as a "nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbation fantasy"). The foundation also supported Dinesh D’Souza, author of Illiberal Education, which blasted "political correctness," castigating rules requiring sensitivity to women and minorities as the overreaching of liberal thought police. In addition, the Olin foundation funded professors at leading universities all over the country, including Harvard’s Harvey C. Mansfield and Samuel P. Huntington. It donated $3.3 million to Mansfield’s Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard, which emphasized a conservative interpretation of American government...
mma 5 23
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-contributor-marc-thiessen-encourages-low-polling-gop-candidates-drop-out-help-defeat
dart kos 11 21
News outlets under the First Amendment have a tremendous amount of leeway, and, of course, they should. They should be entitled to print diverse, conflicting, even vehemently oppositional views, and they shouldn't be concerned about how many people might disagree with any given viewpoint they choose to print. Hell, that's why we're all here on Daily Kos.
But there's also an issue of responsibility and decorum that we've learned to expect from those hallowed, established news outlets we consider as trustworthy. And this, by right-wing columnist Marc Thiessen, is just intolerable, coming from The Washington Post. It's beyond the pale of what anyone is entitled to expect from a publication with The Post's history. Go ahead and read it, and if it doesn't give you a queasy feeling inside, then you probably don't understand journalism.
Because this isn't journalism.It's trolling. Worse than that, it's blatant, insouciant trolling. Thiessen used to work for Roger Stone, and it shows. He tries to make some bald-assed excuses and justifications for it, but they're specious and transparent. They're a thinly-veiled front for trollery itself, pure and simple.
For those of you barred by the paywall, Thiessen wrote a defense—actually, a celebration—of the"Let's go, Brandon" chant.
These two paragraphs are about all anyone needs to get the flavor of Thiessen's piece.
Count me among those in favor of the new chant.
First, it replaces a vulgar epithet with a sarcastic commentary on Biden's disastrous presidency. The focus shifts from insulting Biden the person, to well justified mockery of Biden's catastrophic actions in office. Worst inflation in 30 years? Let's go Brandon! Gas prices up $1.31 a gallon since his election? Let's go Brandon! Home heating prices skyrocketing? Let's go Brandon! Self-inflicted crisis at the southern border? Let's go Brandon! Left hundreds of Americans behind in Afghanistan? Let's go Brandon! Can't find a Thanksgiving turkey or the Christmas gifts your kids want because store shelves are bare? Let's go Brandon! Approval rating dropped to 36 percent? Let's go Brandon!
[…]
People are using it in hilarious ways. In Virginia, someone broke into the control cabinets for two electronic road signs and changed the messaging to read "Let's go Brandon!" When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis held a signing ceremony for a legislation barring vaccine mandates in his state, he held it in Brandon, Fla.. In Brandon, Minn., someone put the words "Let's go" in front of six signs welcoming visitors to the city.
There are plenty of venues online for trolls, but they shouldn't include The Washington Post. There's something seriously awry, something seriously wrong with the outlet's editorial decision-making.
I admit I rarely encounter anything quite so off-putting in journalism that I can't find a rationalization for it, so this is a rarity, and I think a lot of my reaction has to do with the source itself. I can't fathom this kind of writing passing muster under any prior formulation or ownership of The Post, so I have to wonder if that is the reason we're seeing it here.
My feeling is that Thiessen's column should never have been allowed to go to print. Perhaps The Post feels this is the best representation of a "conservative" viewpoint available. But I have to wonder whether a supposedly mainstream, authoritative, and scrupulous news outlet that permits something that purports to defend trolling, even on its opinion pages, is really worth my time. If it's that bad, that empty-headed and trollish, why publish it? This goes well beyond "differences in opinion." It's just a matter of class, reputation, and ultimately, trustworthiness.
I guess your mileage may vary.
https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/is-the-gop-really-willing-to-burn-our-republic-to-the-ground-in-order-to-maintain-its-hold-on-power
...
Gaslighting for Beginners
The standard GOP gaslighting on Ukrainegate is beautifully exemplified by the columnist Marc Thiessen, a regular contributor to the Washington Post and a living rebuttal to the canard that the media leans left. Thiessen writes: “There is absolutely nothing wrong with asking foreign heads of state or intelligence officials to cooperate with an official Justice Department investigation.”
True. If this were a legitimate investigation aimed at advancing US national interests, rather than an illegal personal crusade to benefit Donald J. Trump. The attempt to spin it as the former is at the heart of the Republican counter-strategy, but it doesn’t hold a thimbleful of water.
It’s hardly worth the figurative ink required to dismantle all the dishonesty in his statement, but just as an exercise:
The DOJ “investigation” that Bill Barr is heading—aimed at undermining the US Intelligence Community’s conclusion that Russian aided Trump in the 2016 election—is itself a partisan sham and abuse of power. Citing it as justification for Trump strongarming Kiev is a circular argument and master class in graft. Team Trump’s contention that its interest in Ukraine was and is an altruistic campaign against generic “corruption” is laughable, especially coming from the most corrupt presidency in modern US history. The only “corruption” Trump referred to in the Zelensky call was the fairy tale of Biden’s wrongdoing. (Even if one believes Hunter Biden was unethically trading on his father’s position, Joe Biden was in no way complicit in that…..and by the by, that is the entire stock-in-trade of the Trump children.) Only the willfully blind could fail to recognize Trump’s true motive as regards Ukraine—damaging a political rival, and using the full might of the US presidency to do so, which is the very epitome of the corruption in its own right.
Of course, it has grown tedious to point out that if Barack Obama had phoned a foreign leader and demanded an investigation of Tagg Romney while holding US military aid for ransom, he would already be the GOP poster child for a new version of “Strange Fruit,” covered by Kid Rock and Ted Nugent.
But Thiessen’s disgraceful apologia represents mainstream conservative thought in the age of Donald, where seldom is heard a discouraging word. Never, in fact.
To that end, I was admittedly shocked to see some Republicans, including those twin pillars of hypocrisy Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham (to the extent that a pillar can be spineless and flaccid) push back over Trump’s unconscionable betrayal of our Kurdish allies this week. Why the GOP is willing to risk incurring Trump’s wrath over that and not, say, over selling our country out to the highest bidder, remains a mystery. But no elected Republican, not even Mitt Romney, who is what passes for a GOP profile in courage these days (we’re grading on a sliding scale), has really stood up to the president in the way that his actions call for. And I am not confident that sufficient numbers will do so should it come down to an impeachment trial in the Senate.
(On the subject of Syria, and adding to the madness, at a time when Trump desperately needs the fealty of Senate Republicans, why did he choose this moment to piss off even Moscow Mitch and Leningrad Lindsey? More proof that he doesn’t think strategically at all, only impulsively, despite repeated efforts to credit him for such.)
But even this rare sighting of the elusive Republican vertebrate in the wild has a dark side, as noted by the New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie in what may have been the most incisive observation of the week. In addressing this question of why Republicans stick with Trump so submissively, the conventional wisdom is that it’s a Faustian bargain. But Bouie argues convincingly that it’s really something much simpler and uglier: they agree with him.
"Trump has taken an ax to domestic spending programs for the poor—his Agriculture Department just :{proposed:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: new cuts to food stamps; he signed a tax cut that funnels trillions to the highest earners; and he stacked the federal judiciary with right-wing ideologues. It’s hard to imagine a better outcome for a conservative politician."
Bouie points to the pushback on Syria as evidence that this narrative that the GOP fears the wrath of Trump and his base is wrong. They will in fact stand up to him when they wish….and not only on foreign policy but on tariffs and economic issues as well. So perhaps we should take those Republicans at their word when they say they don’t think blackmailing foreign powers for personal gain with US tax dollars is a problem.
As long as it’s a Republican who does it.
...
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https://www.mediamatters.org/crime-and-criminal-justice/mainstream-media-coverage-crime-pushes-right-wing-narratives-blame
no lnx vid
Mainstream media coverage of crime pushes right-wing narratives that blame Democrats, but crime is worse in GOP-controlled areas
Crime is rising in rural areas, cities, and states run by Republicans despite GOP claims that progressive policies are to blame
WRITTEN BY ZACHARY PLEAT
PUBLISHED 10/25/22
Mainstream media outlets are bombarding prospective voters with coverage about crime, playing into election narratives from conservatives and Republicans that blame both individual incidents and broad nationwide trends on Democrats. But this news coverage often fails to debunk these disproved GOP narratives or note that violent crime has also risen in GOP-run areas.
Some notable recent mainstream media failures in pre-midterm reporting include giving a free pass to Georgia U.S. Senate nominee Herschel Walker’s lack of performance in debates, failing to press GOP nominees on their scandals and flip-flops, scandalizing Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman’s recovery from his stroke earlier this year, and allowing Arizona’s secretary of state nominee Mark Finchem to spout conspiracy theories and lie his way through an interview unchallenged.
The poor coverage has continued in some news reports about crime as an issue in the upcoming elections. Republicans have hyped the specter of crime to an absurd degree, and numerous stories have taken the bait, featuring snippets of GOP ads, quotes from Republicans emphasizing narratives blaming Democratic policies or focusing on crime in Democratic-run areas, and/or focusing on polling showing that voters prefer Republicans to Democrats on crime.
A September 26 New York Times article headlined “G.O.P. redoubles efforts to tie Democrats to high crime rates” included all of these Republican-friendly narratives. An October 5 Politico article headlined “Midterm voters key in on crime” noted, “Republicans relentlessly tie Democrats to a pandemic-era rise in crime on the campaign trail and in TV ads.” An October 15 article from The Hill, headlined “Republicans ride crime wave worries in midterms home stretch,” reported that “Republicans up and down the ballot are working to make worries about a crime wave translate to a red wave,” citing one political ad in Illinois, quoting one Republican gubernatorial candidate, and citing multiple polls on the issue including one saying voters think Republicans are “better suited to deal with crime than Democrats.”
On October 20, NPR’s All Things Considered aired a segment which bore the online headline “Democrats are embracing the police, but can that distract from crime in their cities?” An October 25 Associated Press story on the New York gubernatorial race explained that “Republicans around the country are closing with a message that follows closely to what [Lee] Zeldin has argued much of the year. In recent debates from Georgia to Michigan and Wisconsin, GOP contenders have blasted Democrats as inattentive to crime.” And on October 21, NBC News correspondent Dasha Burns aired a segment on MSNBC’s Morning Joe pushing GOP narratives on crime in Pennsylvania.
Video From the October 21, 2022, edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe
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Yet, for all this attention given to GOP narratives on crime, none of these stories pointed out that while Republicans blame Democrats for violent crime, it’s nearly as high or worse in GOP-run parts of the country. In June, The Wall Street Journal reported that “Violent crime isn’t just rising in the nation’s cities. Murder rates across the rural U.S. have soared during the pandemic.” From the article:
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Homicide rates in rural America rose 25% in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was the largest rural increase since the agency began tracking such data in 1999. The CDC considers counties rural if they are located outside metropolitan areas defined by the federal government.
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The rise came close to the 30% spike in homicide rates in metropolitan areas in 2020.
The CDC hasn’t analyzed 2021 homicide data yet. In some rural counties, murder rates remained high last year, while in others they have begun to recede along with Covid, data from local law-enforcement agencies shows.
The center-left think tank Third Way released a report on March 15 titled “The red state murder problem,” which found that “despite a media narrative to the contrary, this is a problem that afflicts Republican-run cities and states as much or more than the Democratic bastions.”
Third Way also found that in 2020, “per capita murder rates were 40% higher in states won by Donald Trump than those won by Joe Biden” and “8 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2020 voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century.”
From the report, which used data from 2019 and 2020 because data from 2021 wasn’t yet available:
Every news outlet from FOX to CNN to The New York Times to local newspapers has a story with attention-grabbing headlines like “US cities hit all-time murder records.” Fox News and Republicans have jumped on this and framed it as a “Democrat” problem. They blame it on Democrat’s “soft-on-crime” approach and have even referred to a New York District Attorney’s approach as “hug-a-thug.” Many news stories outside of Fox have also purported that police reform is responsible for this rise in murder and have pointed to cities like New York and Los Angeles.
…
But there is a large piece of the homicide story that is missing and calls into question the veracity of the right-wing obsession over homicides in Democratic cities: murder rates are far higher in Trump-voting red states than Biden-voting blue states. And sometimes, murder rates are highest in cities with Republican mayors.
For example, Jacksonville, a city with a Republican mayor, had 128 more murders in 2020 than San Francisco, a city with a Democrat mayor, despite their comparable populations. In fact, the homicide rate in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco was half that of House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s Bakersfield, a city with a Republican mayor that overwhelmingly voted for Trump. Yet there is barely a whisper, let alone an outcry, over the stunning levels of murders in these and other places.
An October 20 article published in The Atlantic also reported on “an exhaustive new study” from the Center for American Progress that “compares cities that have elected so-called progressive prosecutors with places whose district attorneys continue to pursue more traditional approaches.”
Senior editor Ronald Brownstein explained that this study “found that murder rates increased in a smaller share of cities with progressive prosecutors (56 percent) than in those with traditional prosecutors (68 percent) or prosecutors who fell in the middle (62 percent).” From the article:
Countering conventional wisdom, the study found that homicides over recent years increased less rapidly in cities with progressive prosecutors than in those with more traditional district attorneys. It also found no meaningful differences between cities with progressive or traditional DAs in the trends for larceny and robbery. “I think it’s really important to emphasize the extent to which we looked for a relationship and found none” between a prosecutors’ commitment to reform and crime rates, Todd Foglesong, a fellow in residence at the University of Toronto and one of the co-authors, told me.
And on October 22, former Washington Post columnist Radley Balko, who often writes about the criminal justice system, exposed the GOP’s bait-and-switch when focusing on crime in Democratic-run areas while upbraiding a sloppy column in the Post from his former colleague and serial misinformer Marc Thiessen. From Balko's substack newsletter, The Watch:
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It’s certainly true that where people live closer together, they’re more likely to kill each other. More density means more crime. This has been true since the dawn of civilization. It has nothing to do with Democrats and Republicans.
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But as James Surowiecki points out on Twitter, if we were to eliminate the murder statistics from Kansas City and St. Louis, the rest of Missouri’s murder rate would still be higher than that of New York state, even if you include murder statistics from New York City. Put another way, Republican-run Missouri’s murder rate without its two largest cities is still higher than Democrat-run New York’s with its two largest cities.
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The same is true of Louisiana, Kentucky, and Mississippi, three other states Thiessen mentions in his column. Thiessen wants to blame those states’ high murder rates on cities like Jackson, New Orleans, and Baton Rouge. But as Surowieki points out, the murder rates in those states without those cities would still rank among the top 10 most murderous in the country.
…
Last year, for example, Republicans and police groups pointed out that Oklahoma City was one of the few large cities to see a drop in homicides in 2020. Since Oklahoma City is in a red state, has a Republican mayor, and has a traditional, law-and-order district attorney, conservatives contrasted the city to places like San Francisco and Portland (both of which, it’s worth noting, have much lower homicide rates than most cities in the country). But homicides in Oklahoma City then shot up in 2021, from 76 homicides to 90. So they stopped using it as an example.
The largest U.S. city with a Republican mayor -- Jacksonville, Florida -- set a 23-year high for murders in 2020. The city saw a dip in 2021, but only after that particularly violent year, and it remains the most murderous city in Florida. So if you want to measure the change in murders from 2020 to 2021, Jacksonville is a Republican success story. If you want to measure the overall murder rate, it remains more violent than progressive-led, Republican-whipping boy cities like Tampa.
The next largest city with a Republican mayor is Ft. Worth, Texas. Homicides soared there in 2021, despite falling in nearby Dallas. The next largest Republican-led cities of Fresno, Mesa, Omaha, Colorado Springs, Miami, and Tulsa have all also seen an increase in murders since the pandemic. Bakersfield, California, which has a Republican mayor and has long been a bastion of conservative politics and law-and-order prosecutors, has long had one of the highest murder rates in the country.
As of 2020, 11 of the 50 largest cities in the U.S. were run by Republicans, and 10 saw a spike in murders since the pandemic began.
This crucial context is missing from the mainstream media reports listed above, which consistently push the right-wing narrative that Democrats are to blame for high crime.
Many of the articles we mentioned above highlighted polls showing Republicans having an advantage on this issue. The New York Times article stated: “Polling shows that voters tend to see Republicans as stronger on public safety. By a margin of 10 percentage points, voters nationwide said they agreed more with Republicans on crime and policing, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll” from September.
Politico reported that “Republicans are leaning into fears that are evident in the polling: About three-quarters of respondents said violent crime is increasing nationally.” The Hill cited three polls on the importance of crime to voters for the upcoming elections, then added: “Another Sept. 23-Oct. 3 Reuters poll found that more voters think Republicans are better suited to deal with crime than Democrats, 39 percent to 30 percent.”
With the stated importance of this issue among voters, media outlets have a responsibility to get the story correct; rather than relying on what voters think is happening with crime, they should tell readers the reality. If they did, perhaps the polls they cite wouldn’t be so favorable to the Republicans who are lying about crime.
Crime and criminal justice
Related
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10/21/22
Listen to Media Matters' Matt Gertz explain Fox News’ hypocritical and disingenuous “crime” coverage