Tag: cable news
Cable News Mostly Ignores Sharp National Decline In Homicides

Cable News Mostly Ignores Sharp National Decline In Homicides

U.S. homicide rates have significantly reduced since the COVID-19 pandemic, but cable news networks have largely failed to cover the decline despite previously fearmongering about the perceived increase in crime since 2020. CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and Newsmax made 17 mentions of the declining homicide rate since March 3, when Bloomberg’s Justin Fox cited crime data compiled by AH Datalytics to report: “The shocking rise in murders that began in the summer of 2020 looks as if it may have played out.”

Although homicide rates did spike during the COVID-19 pandemic, that spike now seems to be over — 90 cities in the U.S. have totaled a 12% reduction in homicides from 2022 this year so far, with large cities like New York leading the trend. While this data is preliminary, it suggests that homicide rates are normalizing to the pre-pandemic level.

Last December, The New York Times noted that the similar drop in homicides in 2022 from 2021 and 2020 went largely unnoticed by much of the media due to “bad news bias” that focuses on lurid headlines and stories about violent crime to drive engagement. One example of this bias came earlier this month, when The Washington Times published an article titled “Multiple U.S. cities experiencing decline in homicides, research firm says.” Yet the right-wing newspaper posted about the story on Twitter with a graphic highlighting three cities with increasing homicides. Reporter Lois Beckett noted that the tweet also misleadingly quotes one analyst that “the U.S. may be experiencing one of the largest annual percent changes in murder ever recorded” to falsely suggest homicide rates are increasing.

Right-wing media have led the way on using crime as a talking point. Fox News focused on “America’s crime crisis” in the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections to attack liberal criminal justice reforms while pushing failed conservative approaches to address crime. This right-wing fearmongering largely focused on crime rates in supposedly blue cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, even though the homicide statistics show they are among the safest large cities in the country.

Mainstream news outlets responded to right-wing media’s “crime crisis” narrative by mimicking it in their own coverage and often, uncritically repeated the right-wing framing that crime is worse in Democrat-run areas when the opposite is true. When New York Mayor Eric Adams won his election in 2021, mainstream media harped on the idea that crime rates have become a major focal point in the American electorate. CNN’s recent coverage of tech executive Bob Lee’s murder often used the tragedy as a platform to focus on San Francisco's “uptick in crime” rather than the reality of decreasing violent crime and homicides.

A Media Matters review shows that despite the news media’s focus on crime in the 2022 primaries and beyond, there has been little focus on the dramatic drop in homicides across the country. Since March 3, when Bloomberg noted the nationwide decline in homicide rates, MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, and Newsmax have mentioned it 17 times in total. While MSNBC and CNN made up the bulk of these mentions (6 and 5, respectively), Fox News and Newsmax each made note of the decline in murders only 3 times. Of those 6 collective mentions, Fox anchor Eric Shawn was the only person employed by either conservative cable network to note the drop in homicide rates; the rest were guests.

Methodology

Media Matters searched transcripts in the Kinetiq video database for all original programming on CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and Newsmax for the term “rate” within 20 words of either of the terms “murder” or “homicide” from March 3, 2023, when Bloomberg’s Justin Fox first wrote about preliminary 2023 data from AH Datalytics, through June 14, 2023.

We included mentions, which we defined as instances when a single speaker in a segment on any topic mentioned the 2023 declining national murder rate or mentioned that the murder rate in a specific city had declined in 2023. We did not include instances when a speaker merely mentioned a low murder rate without comparing that rate to a prior time period.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

#EndorseThis: Hasan Minhaj’s Critical Review Of Cable News Idiocy, 2017 Edition

#EndorseThis: Hasan Minhaj’s Critical Review Of Cable News Idiocy, 2017 Edition

In this year-end special, reviewing the daily stupid brought to us by cable news, Hasan Minhaj is merciless. The sharpshooting Daily Show correspondent fires away at Fox News — “favorite after-school hangout of accused sex offenders” — including a brilliant takedown of Sean Hannity’s insane Clinton conspiracy chart. But he doesn’t spare Rachel Maddow’s most embarrassing moment, either.

Watching Don Lemon’s drunk New Year’s Eve 2017 moment and Tomi Lahren’s repetitive may induce cringing — and it’s all just a funny reminder not to take cable too seriously in 2018.

Ditch The Trump Double Standard For The Debates

Ditch The Trump Double Standard For The Debates

Published with permission from Media Matters for America.

Like cigarette smokers who have admitted they have a nicotine problem but can’t stop puffing, can journalists who have already admitted they use a weaker standard to score Republican nominee Donald Trump make a clean break while grading the Republican’s debate performance next week?

By all indications, reporters know using the double standard is wrong, and that it’s not okay to demand Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton regularly clear higher hurdles than her opponent. They know adopting different standards to grade presidential candidates disregards rules of campaign fair play for the press.

Yet even though the double standard has been widely acknowledged in recent weeks, there’s still a likelihood it will be employed for debate analysis. That’s how strong the allure seems to be.

Already we’re hearing rumblings that Clinton has more to lose at the debate, and that if Trump manages to not insult large portions of the electorate, the event will represent a victory for him. What’s doubly concerning is that Trump already appears to be actively trying to intimidate the debate moderators in hopes they’ll go easy on him. (According to network news executives, moderators Lester Holt from NBC and Fox’s Chris Wallace were chosen to “appease” Trump.)

If Trump bullies the moderators and the press uses a weaker standard to grade him, then the debates are no longer fair campaign fights because a media-sanctioned ‘victory’ for Clinton will be that much harder to obtain.

“He won’t have to win policy arguments or outshine Clinton’s qualifications – anyone who’s been watching this race will already know he can’t do either,” noted U.S. News & World Report contributor Cary Gibson, who noted that Trump is “generally held to a lower bar than Clinton and this dynamic is likely to prevail during the debates.” She continued, “But if he makes it through the debates with no major gaffes and his composure intact, his performance could get high marks anyway.”

Must be nice.

And from CNN’s Dana Bash:

But I do think that the stakes are much higher in this debate and all the debates for Hillary Clinton because the expectations are higher for her because she is a seasoned politician, she is a seasoned debater. Yes, we saw Donald Trump in the primaries debate for the first time, but he is a first-time politician. So for lots of reasons, maybe it’s not fair but it’s the way it is, the onus is on her.

Fact: Republicans opted to nominate a political novice as their nominee, knowing the possible drawbacks. There’s no reason the Republican nominee should then get special treatment from the press for being a political novice.

Meanwhile, I certainly can’t recall any presidential election where so many journalists conceded, in real time, the double standard at play in the unfolding coverage. In the past, journalists almost always denied that one candidate was being treated differently — being graded easier — than the other. To make that admission was to admit a complete unfairness in the coverage.

But this year the acknowledgments keep coming simply because the double standard in play has been so obvious:

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough: “Donald Trump is held to a lower standard. He just is.”

Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin: “Trump is doing things that if Clinton did, she would be hit a lot harder. We shouldn’t do that.”

New York Times’ Maggie Haberman: “The bar has been lowered for Trump repeatedly.”

CNN’s Brian Stelter: “It is true that Trump is held to a different standard than Clinton.”

The evidence of this is everywhere. When The Washington Post reported that the Trump Foundation had to pay a fine to the IRS for making an illegal $25,000 donation to a PAC supporting the re-election campaign of Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, broadcast news networks devoted just a third as much time to the story as they did to a recent flawed Associated Press story on the Clinton Foundation that proved no ethical misconduct.

Meanwhile, Clinton this month has been regularly attacked in the press for not being transparent, when in fact she’s been far more transparent via personal disclosures than Trump has been.

And recall how last week The New York Times reported on Trump’s proposal for child-care and maternity leave plan and noted, “But in selling his case, Mr. Trump stretched the truth, saying that his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, has no such plan of her own and ‘never will.’”

Trump didn’t “stretch the truth.” He flat out lied: Clinton does have a plan of her own and she unveiled it last year.

Concerns about the media embracing a double standard for debate coverage were rekindled following the NBC’s televised presidential forum earlier this month, and how commentators often rewarded Trump for doing far less than Clinton. The event was hosted Matt Lauer, who came under withering criticism for the drastically different approaches he took to interviewing each candidate that night.

“Lauer’s gentle questioning of Trump — after grilling Clinton over her use of the private email server and her 2003 vote in favor of the Iraq War — is but one example of television journalists treating the GOP nominee with kid gloves,” noted Politico in a piece headlined, “Why Donald Trump Gets A Pass.”

But again, the media schizophrenia remains ever present: Just days before, Politico used a sliding scale for analyzing the NBC forum. Politico stressed both candidates did poorly because “she look[ed] uncertain while he sound[ed] uninformed.” And “Clinton wobbled on style. Trump stumbled on substance.” (Why not hold both accountable for style and substance?)

So one day after Politico clearly graded the two candidates using a different scale, Politico conceded the media uses a different scale when grading the two candidates.

Please ditch this for the debate.

Trump’s Cable TV Network Is The Vanity Project He Needs

Trump’s Cable TV Network Is The Vanity Project He Needs

If a report published Thursday in Vanity Fair — that Donald Trump is considering creating a “mini-media conglomerate,” anchored by a cable news network aimed at his current base turns out to be accurate, it confirms the worst aspect of Trump’s candidacy for president: This is all about him.

Donald Trump never wanted to be president, I figure: He wanted to be the most famous person in the world. And after achieving that goal by winning the Republican nomination, he has run a lackluster, losing campaign, race baiting presidents and federal judges even though it’s obvious that that immeasurably hurts his chances at the Oval Office; and continuously returning attention, even in his response to America’s worst mass shooting, to himself.

We should have expected as much. From the first day of his campaign, Trump has run on a platform of… his own personality.

Just a month into his campaign Trump bragged that “I’m not sure I have” ever asked God for forgiveness. “I don’t bring God into that picture,” he said.

After the bombing of a Christian theme park in Pakistan in March, Trump ominously reminded supporters of his stance on counterterrorism: “I alone can solve“.

On Tuesday, after withering criticism from within GOP when he implied the president of the United States knew in advance about the massacre of 49 people in Orlando, Trump reminded them who ought really be at the center of attention: “Either stick together, or let me just do it by myself,” he said. “I’ll do very well.”

Sure, Donald. You’ll do fine. Incidentally, recent polls show the most unpopular major party presidential nominee has gotten even more unpopular.

The move to turn the ultra media savvy campaign into an ultra media savvy news or entertainment effort would require the same skills Trump has leaned on his whole life — bullying, bluster, bullshitting — without the faux patriotism or commitment to service or charity.

Trump won’t be alone in monetizing his political success: After Mike Huckabee’s 2008 presidential campaign, he got his own Fox program, Huckabee, and his own daily radio show. Ben Carson went on a book tour during his presidential campaign. Joe Scarborough turned the charm of a brief congressional career into a much more lucrative morning spot on MSNBC.

And Sarah Palin, perhaps the closest in style and lack-of-substance to Trump’s verbal spasm of a political career, ended her governorship of Alaska a year early to star in Sarah Palin’s Alaska on TLC and publish a book, Going Rogue. In 2014, The Sarah Palin Channel began a one-year life online before crashing and burning.

Donald Trump obviously marks somewhat of a departure from the conservative media industrial complex: He was famous before he was political, for one, and if anything his surely-brief career as a conservative figure has so far made him much less popular than the cruel boss he played on The Apprentice. Most people don’t want that guy running the country.

But Trump’s supporters do. Which begs the question: Assuming Trump loses the presidency — which he seems to believe, unless he plans on running a media company from the White House, breaking more than a few federal laws in the process — will his supporters feel the same loyalty to a Donald Trump neutered of all potential political power?

Here’s my guess: Without the potential for political control, Trump will turn into a sad echo of his current persona — neutered, powerless, and sad.

But he will still be Trump, and so he will continue to constitute his own identity through the eyes of his “audience,” whether they be voters with the ability to ruin the course of American history, duped wealth seminar enrollees, tourists passing in front of his goofy buildings, or a brand new TV audience.

God willing, Donald Trump won’t step foot in the White House. From all indications, he’d be much happier delivering his opinions to households around the country without the burden of responsibility. So let him get his ego fix, just don’t give him the launch codes.

 

Photo: Republican U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump departs after he was deposed for a lawsuit involving partners in a restaurant venture at offices in Washington, U.S. June 16, 2016.  REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst