WWTBAM Bored

In the weeks leading up to the US midterm elections, the message from Fox News was clear: violent crime is surging, cities are dangerous hellscapes and Democrats are responsible. With the vote over, however, the rightwing news channel appeared to decide things weren’t that bad after all, and decreased its coverage of violent crime by 50% compared with the pre-election average.

Media Matters for America, a media watchdog, found that each week from Labor Day until the Friday before the Tuesday 8 November vote, the network averaged 141 segments on crime across weekdays. The blanket crime coverage matched the Republican party’s efforts to depict violent crime as out of control, and portray Democrats as responsible. In the week of the midterms, however, once voting was over, Fox News aired just 71 segments on violent crime, Media Matters reported.
“I think this shows pretty clearly that the amount of Fox coverage of violent crime doesn’t really have anything to do with the level of violent crime in America – it has to do with the political benefits,” said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters. “It crescendoed right before election day, and then once the election was over, so was America’s crime crisis no longer the subject of maximum concern that it had been in the previous weeks.”

Media Matters noted that Fox News crime coverage had increased somewhat in recent days after the shooting at the University of Virginia and the student killings in Idaho, but said “the coverage was notably less focused on painting Democratic cities as crime-infested”.

silverscreenselect wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 26, 2022 9:56 am

In the weeks leading up to the US midterm elections, the message from Fox News was clear: violent crime is surging, cities are dangerous hellscapes and Democrats are responsible. With the vote over, however, the rightwing news channel appeared to decide things weren’t that bad after all, and decreased its coverage of violent crime by 50% compared with the pre-election average.

Media Matters for America, a media watchdog, found that each week from Labor Day until the Friday before the Tuesday 8 November vote, the network averaged 141 segments on crime across weekdays. The blanket crime coverage matched the Republican party’s efforts to depict violent crime as out of control, and portray Democrats as responsible. In the week of the midterms, however, once voting was over, Fox News aired just 71 segments on violent crime, Media Matters reported.
“I think this shows pretty clearly that the amount of Fox coverage of violent crime doesn’t really have anything to do with the level of violent crime in America – it has to do with the political benefits,” said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters. “It crescendoed right before election day, and then once the election was over, so was America’s crime crisis no longer the subject of maximum concern that it had been in the previous weeks.”

Media Matters noted that Fox News crime coverage had increased somewhat in recent days after the shooting at the University of Virginia and the student killings in Idaho, but said “the coverage was notably less focused on painting Democratic cities as crime-infested”.

https://news.yahoo.com/crime-coverage-f ... 05245.html

The only place that the crimewave message seems to have had an effect was the New York suburbs (and the WI senate election). The Democrats lost the House because of their losses in New York and Florida. Expect some more legal challenges there before 2024 (the Democrats were victims of the "too late to do anything about it" factor in 2022).