A new study by Media Matters suggests that we have Tucker Carlson to thank for the Fox News/GOP midterm, crime fear mongering blitz that only seems to care about crimes that can be used against Democrats. That’s the same Tucker Carlson who seems to relish endangering Americans.
Remember when Fox said nobody should consider Tucker Carlson a trustworthy truthteller? Fox seems to have forgotten that now that they’re off the hook for that particular defamation case (a few more doozies are teed up, though) and focused like a laser beam on retaking the House and Senate in the midterm elections next month.
From Media Matters:
Fox star Tucker Carlson advised Republican politicians during an August 19 monologue to focus on “law and order” in order to create a “red wave” in the fall. He urged GOP candidates to run ads featuring viral footage of crimes and provided them with a political message: “Joe Biden's DOJ has done nothing to stop the crime wave and so it is accelerating everywhere.” The GOP’s candidates and admakers listened; within weeks, the party turned crime into “a central message” of its TV advertisements.
Carlson and his fellow Fox prime-time hosts, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, have supported the GOP’s advertising blitz by providing a constant stream of incendiary commentary on the issue: Tucker Carlson Tonight, Hannity, and The Ingraham Anglebroadcast 97 segments that included significant discussions of violent crime between Carlson’s August 19 monologue and October 14. Carlson’s show accounted for 34 of the crime segments, Hannity’s for 38, and Ingraham’s for 25.
Seventy-three of those segments blamed Democratic, progressive, or liberal policies, candidates, organizations, or politicians, for a general increase in violent crime, or for a specific violent crime, or otherwise alleged they were “soft” on violent crime. Such segments accounted for roughly 8% of all prime-time segments during the period, creating a broader context for viewers when they see the GOP’s TV spots.
Never mind that statistics don’t bear out the anti-Democratic hysteria. While it’s true violent crime has increased, a July, 2022 report by Ames Grawert, of the Brennan Center for Justice, notes that it is not a Democratic phenomenon, as Fox would like you to believe:
Despite politicized claims that this rise was the result of criminal justice reform in liberal-leaning jurisdictions, murders rose roughly equally in cities run by Republicans and cities run by Democrats. So-called “red” states actually saw some of the highest murder rates of all. This data makes it difficult to pin recent trends on local policy shifts and reveals the basic inaccuracy of attempts to politicize a problem as complex as crime. Instead, the evidence points to broad national causes driving rising crime.
Furthermore, the Brennan Center found that Democratic policies are probably not the cause: “Broadly, it does not appear that policies associated with criminal justice reform were a significant contributor to recent trends in crime and violence,” Grawert wrote. You know what the Brennan Center found were some of the contributing factors? Guns, socioeconomic instability and disruptions to community life.
But we know Fox is only interested in exploiting crime, not understanding it. In fact, when high-profile Republicans commit crimes, Fox could not be less interested. Case in point: U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker. In addition to his being unqualified, unintelligible, hypocritical, a chronic liar, and a negligent father, Walker threatened to shoot his wife in the head. Yet the Hannity show spent a full show campaigning for Walker's election and pretending it was a "town hall."
Nor does Fox seem to care much about any of the many, many criminal charges Donald Trump is facing. By the way, another one surfaced just today.
Even worse, Tucker Carlson deliberately endangers people whose views he dislikes. He has deliberately endangered journalists, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Rep. Eric Swalwell; promoted and echoed the sentiments of people who are deliberately wreaking threats and violence against medical centers providing gender care. He has sided with vigilante killer Kyle Rittenhouse; and repeatedly suggested that viewers may need to take the law into their own hands when he has promoted the white supremacist “great replacement” theory. That same white supremacist rhetoric has also been pushed on Fox by at least 24 paid Fox personalities and 22 guests.
In other words, Fox and the Murdochs are just fine with the inflammatory, endangering rhetoric.
So keep that in mind as you watch the Media Matters mash up of Fox’s melodramatic and phony-baloney concern for public safety, below.
