Listen to Media Matters' Matt Gertz explain Fox News’ hypocritical and disingenuous “crime” coverage
Gertz: “What they’re interested in is leveraging crime as a way to win elections”
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Listen to Media Matters' Matt Gertz explain Fox News’ hypocritical and disingenuous “crime” coverage
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From the October 19, 2022, edition of Sirius XM's The Michaelangelo Signorile Show
MICHELANGELO SIGNORILE (HOST): You also focused in on the hypocrisy of the Republicans' messaging on crime and, again, they're able to just get away with this because media is not really doing anything to explain the facts.
MATT GERTZ (GUEST): Yeah. So I did a study this morning about how Fox has worked to try to turn crime into a political cudgel against Democrats. We looked at Fox primetime coverage beginning on August 19 when Tucker Carlson told Republican politicians that they should focus on law and order in order to get a red wave and blamed Joe Biden's DOJ for doing nothing to stop the crime wave that is accelerating everywhere. We found that between then and the end of last week, roughly one in nine of their segments had been about violent crime. 11% of all segments in Fox primetime for a period of a couple of months have been, you know, basically nothing but viral footage of crimes that happen somewhere and insinuations or claims that Democrats are responsible for all of it.
But of course, they're not concerned with all crimes. They have no problem with January 6 insurrectionists, who they defend all the time. They've attacked the investigation into Donald Trump's handling of classified documents as some sort of political witch hunt. They've attacked the Biden administration for trying to crack down on tax evasion because apparently wealthy tax cheats are the greatest of all Americans. And, you know, they stood by Herschel Walker, the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia, whose ex-wife said he once held a gun to her head and threatened to pull the trigger.
So these are not people who are interested in stopping crime. Republicans do not have basically any legislation whatsoever that would curtail crime in any way. What they're interested in is leveraging crime as a way to win elections and then do the things that they always wanted to: ban abortions, cut taxes for rich people and slash social security, even if it means holding a gun to the country.