There’s no mistake that something is going on with violent crime. Look at any large city’s news sites and you can see the evidence plain as day. People are being killed at startling rates. It’s been worse, sure, but that was decades ago. We’re not really prepared to see this and just shrug it off.
However, it seems that despite the reports, some don’t think the mainstream media is really paying enough of the right kind of attention.
A violent crime wave has gripped major cities across America after months of the mainstream media downplaying a spike in violence, falsely declaring sometimes-vicious protests as peaceful and ignoring lawlessness that doesn’t fit their agenda, according to critics who don’t think the press is doing any favors for some of the biggest cities in the United States.
“The Washington Post famously says that ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness.’ So do cities,” Cornell Law School professor and media critic William A. Jacobson told Fox News.
“The lack of national corporate media coverage of the spike in violent crimes does a disservice to people in cities who are the victims, and contributes to the downward spiral,” Jacobson continued. “That these cities almost entirely have progressive mayors suggests some of the lack of coverage is politically motivated.”
Is that true, though?
I ask because, as an artifact of my job here at Bearing Arms, I consume an awful lot of media and I’ve seen a lot of people talking about the surge in violence.
However, has there really been enough? Perhaps more importantly, has that reporting been focused on just the facts, or have journalists tried to present it in a way that would advance a preferred narrative?
A recent poll found that citizens overwhelmingly care more about public safety than topics like race relations and police reform, but the mainstream media regularly ignores public safety-related news. Grabien Media founder Tom Elliott feels that “all reporters, whether they admit it or not, are biased” and one of the most egregious ways bias impacts reporting is when news judgment affects journalists’ opinions of themselves.
“Journalists love stories where they’re the good guys while usually ignoring the ones where they’re in any way culpable,” Elliot told Fox News. “What’s happening in American cities — particularly the ones where the George Floyd riots were the most violent — with crime and gang violence spiraling out of control, is largely being ignored for exactly this reason: it’s not a narrative that neatly fits into their usual ‘we’re the good guys here’ framework.”
Elliott noted that corporate media has spent the last year “irresponsibly hyping” racial conflict and anti-police narratives, so news consumers shouldn’t be surprised that “cops are quitting en masse and cities are returning to the bad old days” of widespread crime.
“When the media have made mention of the mayhem, they’ve attempted the neat trick of describing gang violence as ‘mass shootings,’ so as to least squeeze some anti-gun rights nectar from the fruits of their irresponsibility,” Elliott said. “Meanwhile, in cities like Chicago, far more young inner-city lives are being lost to crime than to COVID, the media’s preferred preoccupation.”
Ah, there we go.
And yeah, that happens. A lot.
So far, I’ve seen little speculation in the media about what may be driving this violent crime surge except for the increase in firearms sales. In their minds, the link is so obvious that there’s no reason to look any deeper. They reach out to Giffords or Brady and take what they claim at face value, report it as gospel truth, and then call it a day.
They don’t talk to psychologists about whether months upon months of lockdowns may have given people a hair-trigger that may have resulted in a spike of homicides. They don’t talk to experts about whether talk of defunding the police may have emboldened criminals, nor do they ask whether mask mandates made it so people figured they could get away with a crime that much easier since no one could see their face and the police wouldn’t blink at seeing a masked individual.
None of that has ever come up in any of the media reports I’ve seen. They just want to advance the gun control narrative.
The problem is, that doesn’t really benefit the American people like the media wants you to believe. What we need is honest reporting. Guess what we’re not likely to get, though?
