CNN and MSNBC Followed Fox News In Ramping Up Crime Coverage Ahead of Election: Report
Washington Post columnist Philip Bump took a deep dive into the coverage of various issues in the last six months on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News and asked the question, “What’s the non-obvious reason Fox News is talking about crime more?”
Bump made clear in his column that he believes the rise in mentions of crime toward the end of the summer on Fox News coincided with the Democrat’s surge in the polls around the same time.
“Through July and August, all three networks were mentioning crime about as much as they did in the first half of the year. In late September, though, mentions on Fox News began to soar,” Bump explains above a graphic representation of the same data. He adds that while violent crime certainly did rise in 2020, “it’s not clear that it did nationally in 2021.”
Furthermore, he argues that while there are various data points to show an increase of crime since 2020, “we simply don’t have good data.”
Bump then notes, despite no documented uptick in crime in September and October, “in the middle of October, mentions began to rise on CNN and MSNBC, too, in part as a reflection of the increased discussion of crime on the campaign trail.”
Oddly, however, he notes that while crime has undeniably become an issue in the midterms, “Republicans and Democrats have not been talking about crime disproportionately in their television ads.”
Bump cites an “analysis from USA Today published last week [that] showed that about a third of Democratic ads (for federal, state and some municipal elections) mentioned crime, as did 4 in 10 Republican ads. That latter percentage, though, jumped from 27 percent in August to 40 percent in September.
“A Washington Post analysis found that Republicans have spent $50 million on ads mentioning crime since Labor Day,” noting an uptick as the election neared.
“Wow, Fox really sets CNN’s and MSNBC’s agenda, huh,” asked a reader on Twitter. Bump replied, saying, “I think it’s more that Fox’s focus has overlapped with the emphasis placed on the subject by the GOP and that’s made it more salient to the election.”
Bump sharing the graph on Twitter led to a bevy of various reactions. MSNBC’s bomb-throwing Elie Mystal, wrote, “The media is so goddamn predictable and so entirely in the pocket of the GOP.”
“This is what happened with the “CRT panic” last year on Fox, and the rest of the media went along w it. Fox ran 900segments in June 2021. Now you don’t ever hear about it again. The rest of the media gets led around by the nose by Fox & the GOP,” wrote Aki Peritz.
https://twitter.com/AkiPeritz/status/1585457534210646018
Read Bump’s full column here
