This week's release of FBI data showing that crime reports in the U.S. dropped last year came just weeks before a high-stakes presidential election in which perceptions of crime and safety have become a key political flashpoint. Former President Trump has frequently told bleak and largely bogus stories about violence, claiming “our crime rate’s going through the roof” and “we have crime-ridden cities like we’ve never seen before.” The FBI data contradicted those assertions and were widely reported by news organizations, including CNN, The Associated Press, NBC and The New York Times. The FBI report was met with a virtual blackout by pro-Trump media outlets, reports CNN. The right’s dominant media outlet, Fox News, mentioned the FBI data just once on its air Monday, with “Special Report with Bret Baier,” devoting 28 seconds to the subject, according to TVEyes database searches.
During the segment, Baier told viewers, “critics say the report is not accurate because it does not include big cities,” a false claim promoted by Elon Musk and other Trump supporters on social media. The FBI reported that “every city agency covering a population of 1,000,000 or more inhabitants contributed a full 12 months of data” to the bureau’s reporting program, meaning that the FBI collected data from the largest cities, which it wasn’t previously able to include. Fox's right-wing cable competitors, Newsmax and One America News, also failed to mention the FBI data showing a decline in murders and other crimes, according to the TVEyes database. And the same was true at their online presences. The websites of Fox News, One America News, Breitbart, The Daily Wire, The Gateway Pundit, The Blaze, The Washington Examiner, and The Epoch Times all failed to report the FBI data on Monday. Newsmax published a story on the report from the Reuters news agency. The decision by right-wing media outlets to bury the report underscores the disconnect between public perception on the issue of crime and the reality of falling crime rates. In November, Gallup reported a record 63% of Americans believed crime was either an extremely serious or very serious problem, even as the nation’s violent crime rate has fallen dramatically since the 1990s.
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