On MSNBC, Alex Wagner explains how Fox News fabricates panic about crime waves
Published
Citation From the June 12, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Alex Wagner Tonight
ALEX WAGNER (HOST): If you listen to Donald Trump or conservative politicians and conservative media like Fox News, you probably think that we are in the middle of a massive crime wave. We are not. This week, we got new FBI crime statistics showing that in the first quarter of this year, crime is yet again down across the board. Overall violent crime down 15% from last year. Murders down 26%. By every national metric, crime is down.
Regardless of the facts here, Fox is still going big on crime. The organization Media Matters counted 403 reports about crime on Fox in just the first two months of this year alone. The last time the FBI released crime data, back in March -- crime data that again showed another drop in crime across the board -- Fox gave that data approximately two minutes of air time in the first two weeks after the data came out. Fox only mentioned the declining crime rate seven times in those two weeks, and one of those mentions was this one.