An overwhelming majority of Americans, 64 percent, believe that crime increased across the country in 2024, according to a Gallup survey conducted late last year.
Rigged! Woke statistics! Why, “Big Balls” was allegedly just assaulted by vicious roving youths in DC, which might get him fired because Trump likes manly men who finish fights (not on the ground), but it proves crime is way, way up.
I suspect the "Big Balls" attack was a Jessie Smollet event. This would be in keeping with the constant stream of lies and misinformation DOGE has spewed.
I mean, it does kinda take some big balls to fake an assault so the President can illegally federalize DC. So maybe this guy was just the right guy for the job.
You mean thousands of citizens need to be rounded up, arrested, fined and jailed for daring to voice their opinion that the FBI data is inaccurate and purposely manipulated to benefit the Democrat Party?
Frankie, is it a requirement to become a card carrying felon loving pedophile simp, to be a pathological liar? On top of, of course, to be a racist, bigoted, transphobic, homophobic hater? Or is all this taught to you at grandpappy's knee while at the KKK meetings? For you to think anyone with a working brain would believe you called, let alone trump picked up, a phone call from a simple pick me boy like you 🫵🏻🤣😂🫵🏻 Did you pick orange kneepads or the gold ones?
Don't pick on poor little Frankie. He's doing the best he can considering his level of intelligence and understanding. As trump loves to say, "Low I.Q."
I have no idea what you are talking about and in fact neither do you. You have just strung together a random series of reactionary bumper stickers as if that formed a coherent argument. News flash: It didn't.
The substance of your, um, "response" is like a wisp of smoke in the gale of your failure shown by your lack of both logic and grip on reality. But I will grant its cleverness.
I'm sure you'll have another witty yet vapid comeback since the concept of substance has passed you by, leaving you with no other option. Do not expect me (or anyone) to entertain your snickering blather further.
Another unsurprisingly excellent post from Pop Info! I'm glad for every bit of focus on the media's role in perpetuating myths about the incidence of crime in America. Sure, politicians seeking public office will broadcast the idea that violent crime is on the rise, but news outlets play a large role in amplifying these sentiments.
I cannot be more thankful, grateful and scared to death over your reporting and courage. I am afraid for the day that this regime’s censorship might prevail and I fear for your safety (what gulag will they find for all investigative/factual reporters).
Which is why I ended my subscriptions to The Times and The Post. I grew up with the Post and acquired my love for the Times in my 20s...more than 50 years of trust in information gone. So sad.
I dropped the WaPo after Bezos hired Will Lewis to be publisher despite the fact that Lewis had blatantly obstructed justice in the UK investigation of Murdoch’s News Corp despicable phone hacking. The court ordered all emails be preserved as evidence but Lewis defied that order and had millions of emails erased. Then Lewis had the nerve to try to blame former PM Gordon Brown for making him do that. Brown isn’t letting that lie go — he recently filed a criminal complaint against Will Lewis.
“Gordon Brown makes criminal complaint against Rupert Murdoch’s media empire
Exclusive: Former British PM urges police to reopen inquiry – and claims media executive Will Lewis attempted to incriminate him”
Lewis also tried to bury US reports about his law breaking. He tried to bribe NPR’s David Folkenflik to kill his story about Lewis by offering him an exclusive interview. Folkenflik not only didn’t cave, he published the story which included the bribe. Lewis also tried to suppress WaPo stories about this but they published anyway. Not too long after managing editor Sally Buzbee was forced out but not because of that, right??
“ 'Washington Post' CEO tried to kill a story about himself. It wasn’t the first time”
The same media that went bonkers over the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal can’t be bothered to give this story any coverage. This should be a huge media scandal.
Agrgeed. I kicked the rest to the curb long ago but I kept giving the WaPo chance after chance. Well, everything comes to and end. Good bye WaPo. Let's give Bezos a good kicking on the way out.
So much for the propaganda Re: aliens/migrants/invaders committing "assaults, rapes and murders..." and our communities being over run by crime! The real criminals are in Washington, DC and legislators in a lot of state offices!!
This is an important story, not for its main idea that crime is down, but how crime is reported by media. One must hope that Judd's newsletter has enough juice at this point to trickle up to the mainstreams and for the boardrooms of those big city newspapers to do a little soul searching in their crime reporting. We all know bleeding is leading when it comes to the newsroom but America needs some fn feel good stories right now. Right now.
Yes! I had delusions of becoming a journalism minor back in the day, until I heard that phrase and what went with it. I’m glad there are people like Judd who stayed and report the truth.
Back when I was a young parent, there was still a television station in the Mpls/St. Paul area that did NOT run their evening news by this principal. (middle 1980s). Of course that approach is long gone, now, and to watch the evening news in the area now, you'd think the George Floyd riots were still happening, or about to break out every day.
Some stations still try to maintain their news, but without the sensationalism, they fear they cannot pull in the viewers. Back where I lived for 40 plus years, the local newspaper along with some of the radio and television stations brought down the good ole boy network that met in a bank room downtown and exposed them for basically running a scam on the public. They would decide who would run for mayor, city, county councils, the sheriff, school board and which bank would get the depository for the government entities. The school district, city, state university, county would be pushed to one of the large financial local insitutitions. It was an organized planned monopoly these top "model" business leaders were running. Of course there is not any news group there to do the same anymore. With all the mergers and consolidations and national ownership, the clean newsroom no longer exist. The local paper now prints in Juarez, Mexico - 6 hours away. The oligarchs have won.
I was just about to post a comment making exactly the same point. It's an old newspaper dictum dating from the 1890s and Hearst's yellow journalism. With the advent of TV news and so the addition of the impact of video, the effect was multiplied.
Bottom line: It's all about profit and damn "the public interest."
Just in passing, Psychology Today had an article about "fear-based media" a few years ago that folks might find interesting.
Being from NY and no longer a supporter of legacy media outlets, the rollback of the bail reforms continues to piss me off (for lack of a better way to express my anger at both Rs AND Ds including our current governor). The data supports bail reform, yet Ds always play defense to disinformation and misinformation. I am looking forward to Mamdani becoming the mayor of NYC at least…he gets it.
As the chart shows that “record increase” in the murder rate is barely a blip on that graph. It is nothing compared to the incredibly sharp drop in violent crimes/murders that began in the 1990s. It would be inaccurate to say that the media didn’t pay attention to that drop. In fact they shined a spotlight on it — but just in NYC crime — and used it to give credit to Rudy G’s “broken windows” policing policy. No way would the mainstream “liberal” media have given Bill Clinton credit for the sharp drop in violent crime that happened all across the US so they just refused to acknowledge it.
What the media should have been reporting about is that crime had mysteriously dropped nor just in the US but across the developed world during that era. The best explanation is that the drop was the result of countries reducing lead in their environments, particularly by phasing out leaded gasoline.
The late Kevin Drum wrote extensively about the data supporting this explanation both for Mother Jones and for his own blog.
The charts didn't break it out, but the last I checked, the crime rate, especially the murder rate, is sill quite a bit higher in Republican led cities. Of course Trump constantly says the opposite, but it's about time we all made the determination that whatever Trump says is ALWAYS the opposite of the truth.
And you know they'd be hanging every incident around Biden's neck but the pretender in cheese? Please. The MF took actions that directly and negatively impacted our air industry and passenger safety which affect everyone and what do these mopes wnat to talk about? Biden's last days in office, auto pen, bla, bla, bla... I don't care about that shite! What about the NUT that's in the Executive Mansion now, ripping everything this country is supposed to stand for literally to shreds.
Given the current madness, I’m convinced that 64% of American voters are morons. The other 36% read Judd Legum, Matt Labash, Joe Klein or other rational journalists.
No, they've been turned into functional morons by the information sources by which their heads have been filled with a constant stream of lies and misinformation while, on Sunday mornings, far too many attend the types of churches where they are barraged with heretical human rantings about how the teachings of Jesus are "too woke," and lists of the people those same dysfunctional human leaders are dishonestly and heretically telling them to hate. Just a bit of a clue, if the sermons you're listening to are filled with anger and hatred, your Pastor, Priest, or Minister is serving the opposite side from Jesus.
In a paraphrase of the old song, "They'll know we're NOT Christians by our hate."
The MSM coverage is infuriating! Even though I cancelled my subs to NYT and WaPo bc of their coverage of the election it still irks me - the R's spin on crime is dangerous
If you watch much local news (like my wife does) they are why nearly two-thirds of us think crime is high or higher. It is formula news coverage, just like the 22-minutes of national news on ABC, CBS and NBC. Locally, there is a weather story, a traffic story, maybe a local disaster story or a disaster aftermath story, a national story, a local political story, a feel-good story, often a sports story, and always a crime story. Always. Local editors are lazy and they follow the police activity.
These are compelling statistics but they're much less compelling than one sensational story that grabs people by the gut. Trump knows this and sees an opportunity to advance his power even further by using the DOGE kid as representative of the overwhelming horrors of DC. How do you create a counter-example that signifies "safety"?
Someone at the FBI is getting fired for these calculations.
How about anyone with a college degree gets the boot. And the bootlickers get to stay and do the fun calculations.
Rigged! Woke statistics! Why, “Big Balls” was allegedly just assaulted by vicious roving youths in DC, which might get him fired because Trump likes manly men who finish fights (not on the ground), but it proves crime is way, way up.
I suspect the "Big Balls" attack was a Jessie Smollet event. This would be in keeping with the constant stream of lies and misinformation DOGE has spewed.
Well, we already know Musk’s description of the event differs from the police report… and these guys are all so trustworthy to begin with.
I mean, it does kinda take some big balls to fake an assault so the President can illegally federalize DC. So maybe this guy was just the right guy for the job.
Yeah, but I don't think it's going to be Patel or Bongino.
You mean thousands of citizens need to be rounded up, arrested, fined and jailed for daring to voice their opinion that the FBI data is inaccurate and purposely manipulated to benefit the Democrat Party?
Frank, tell your hero, Trump, to release the Epstein Files!
I did. I called him.
Frankie, is it a requirement to become a card carrying felon loving pedophile simp, to be a pathological liar? On top of, of course, to be a racist, bigoted, transphobic, homophobic hater? Or is all this taught to you at grandpappy's knee while at the KKK meetings? For you to think anyone with a working brain would believe you called, let alone trump picked up, a phone call from a simple pick me boy like you 🫵🏻🤣😂🫵🏻 Did you pick orange kneepads or the gold ones?
Your reading comprehension is very poor. Try harder.
Don't pick on poor little Frankie. He's doing the best he can considering his level of intelligence and understanding. As trump loves to say, "Low I.Q."
I have no idea what you are talking about and in fact neither do you. You have just strung together a random series of reactionary bumper stickers as if that formed a coherent argument. News flash: It didn't.
You should have just posted the first four words and made more sense.
The substance of your, um, "response" is like a wisp of smoke in the gale of your failure shown by your lack of both logic and grip on reality. But I will grant its cleverness.
I'm sure you'll have another witty yet vapid comeback since the concept of substance has passed you by, leaving you with no other option. Do not expect me (or anyone) to entertain your snickering blather further.
Another unsurprisingly excellent post from Pop Info! I'm glad for every bit of focus on the media's role in perpetuating myths about the incidence of crime in America. Sure, politicians seeking public office will broadcast the idea that violent crime is on the rise, but news outlets play a large role in amplifying these sentiments.
This is what the media does when they don’t have any other panic to freak people out about. Remember the satanic and stranger danger panics?
I cannot be more thankful, grateful and scared to death over your reporting and courage. I am afraid for the day that this regime’s censorship might prevail and I fear for your safety (what gulag will they find for all investigative/factual reporters).
Alleged assault..Christ.
Which is why I ended my subscriptions to The Times and The Post. I grew up with the Post and acquired my love for the Times in my 20s...more than 50 years of trust in information gone. So sad.
I dropped the WaPo after Bezos hired Will Lewis to be publisher despite the fact that Lewis had blatantly obstructed justice in the UK investigation of Murdoch’s News Corp despicable phone hacking. The court ordered all emails be preserved as evidence but Lewis defied that order and had millions of emails erased. Then Lewis had the nerve to try to blame former PM Gordon Brown for making him do that. Brown isn’t letting that lie go — he recently filed a criminal complaint against Will Lewis.
“Gordon Brown makes criminal complaint against Rupert Murdoch’s media empire
Exclusive: Former British PM urges police to reopen inquiry – and claims media executive Will Lewis attempted to incriminate him”
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/apr/26/gordon-brown-criminal-complaint-rupert-murdoch-news-group-newspapers
Lewis also tried to bury US reports about his law breaking. He tried to bribe NPR’s David Folkenflik to kill his story about Lewis by offering him an exclusive interview. Folkenflik not only didn’t cave, he published the story which included the bribe. Lewis also tried to suppress WaPo stories about this but they published anyway. Not too long after managing editor Sally Buzbee was forced out but not because of that, right??
“ 'Washington Post' CEO tried to kill a story about himself. It wasn’t the first time”
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/07/nx-s1-4995105/washington-post-will-lewis-tries-to-kill-story-buzbee
The same media that went bonkers over the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal can’t be bothered to give this story any coverage. This should be a huge media scandal.
Agrgeed. I kicked the rest to the curb long ago but I kept giving the WaPo chance after chance. Well, everything comes to and end. Good bye WaPo. Let's give Bezos a good kicking on the way out.
So much for the propaganda Re: aliens/migrants/invaders committing "assaults, rapes and murders..." and our communities being over run by crime! The real criminals are in Washington, DC and legislators in a lot of state offices!!
"The real criminals are in Washington, DC and legislators in a lot of state offices!!"
This!
This is an important story, not for its main idea that crime is down, but how crime is reported by media. One must hope that Judd's newsletter has enough juice at this point to trickle up to the mainstreams and for the boardrooms of those big city newspapers to do a little soul searching in their crime reporting. We all know bleeding is leading when it comes to the newsroom but America needs some fn feel good stories right now. Right now.
If it bleeds, it leads. The profit driven media operation mode.
Yes! I had delusions of becoming a journalism minor back in the day, until I heard that phrase and what went with it. I’m glad there are people like Judd who stayed and report the truth.
Back when I was a young parent, there was still a television station in the Mpls/St. Paul area that did NOT run their evening news by this principal. (middle 1980s). Of course that approach is long gone, now, and to watch the evening news in the area now, you'd think the George Floyd riots were still happening, or about to break out every day.
Some stations still try to maintain their news, but without the sensationalism, they fear they cannot pull in the viewers. Back where I lived for 40 plus years, the local newspaper along with some of the radio and television stations brought down the good ole boy network that met in a bank room downtown and exposed them for basically running a scam on the public. They would decide who would run for mayor, city, county councils, the sheriff, school board and which bank would get the depository for the government entities. The school district, city, state university, county would be pushed to one of the large financial local insitutitions. It was an organized planned monopoly these top "model" business leaders were running. Of course there is not any news group there to do the same anymore. With all the mergers and consolidations and national ownership, the clean newsroom no longer exist. The local paper now prints in Juarez, Mexico - 6 hours away. The oligarchs have won.
I was just about to post a comment making exactly the same point. It's an old newspaper dictum dating from the 1890s and Hearst's yellow journalism. With the advent of TV news and so the addition of the impact of video, the effect was multiplied.
Bottom line: It's all about profit and damn "the public interest."
Just in passing, Psychology Today had an article about "fear-based media" a few years ago that folks might find interesting.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/two-takes-depression/201106/if-it-bleeds-it-leads-understanding-fear-based-media
Being from NY and no longer a supporter of legacy media outlets, the rollback of the bail reforms continues to piss me off (for lack of a better way to express my anger at both Rs AND Ds including our current governor). The data supports bail reform, yet Ds always play defense to disinformation and misinformation. I am looking forward to Mamdani becoming the mayor of NYC at least…he gets it.
As the chart shows that “record increase” in the murder rate is barely a blip on that graph. It is nothing compared to the incredibly sharp drop in violent crimes/murders that began in the 1990s. It would be inaccurate to say that the media didn’t pay attention to that drop. In fact they shined a spotlight on it — but just in NYC crime — and used it to give credit to Rudy G’s “broken windows” policing policy. No way would the mainstream “liberal” media have given Bill Clinton credit for the sharp drop in violent crime that happened all across the US so they just refused to acknowledge it.
What the media should have been reporting about is that crime had mysteriously dropped nor just in the US but across the developed world during that era. The best explanation is that the drop was the result of countries reducing lead in their environments, particularly by phasing out leaded gasoline.
The late Kevin Drum wrote extensively about the data supporting this explanation both for Mother Jones and for his own blog.
“ An Updated Lead-Crime Roundup for 2018”
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/
Brookings has also covered the story:
“ New evidence that lead exposure increases crime”
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/new-evidence-that-lead-exposure-increases-crime/
The charts didn't break it out, but the last I checked, the crime rate, especially the murder rate, is sill quite a bit higher in Republican led cities. Of course Trump constantly says the opposite, but it's about time we all made the determination that whatever Trump says is ALWAYS the opposite of the truth.
Safety comes to us in many ways. What about plane crashes. Dramatic increase since January 20.
And you know they'd be hanging every incident around Biden's neck but the pretender in cheese? Please. The MF took actions that directly and negatively impacted our air industry and passenger safety which affect everyone and what do these mopes wnat to talk about? Biden's last days in office, auto pen, bla, bla, bla... I don't care about that shite! What about the NUT that's in the Executive Mansion now, ripping everything this country is supposed to stand for literally to shreds.
Given the current madness, I’m convinced that 64% of American voters are morons. The other 36% read Judd Legum, Matt Labash, Joe Klein or other rational journalists.
No, they've been turned into functional morons by the information sources by which their heads have been filled with a constant stream of lies and misinformation while, on Sunday mornings, far too many attend the types of churches where they are barraged with heretical human rantings about how the teachings of Jesus are "too woke," and lists of the people those same dysfunctional human leaders are dishonestly and heretically telling them to hate. Just a bit of a clue, if the sermons you're listening to are filled with anger and hatred, your Pastor, Priest, or Minister is serving the opposite side from Jesus.
In a paraphrase of the old song, "They'll know we're NOT Christians by our hate."
The MSM coverage is infuriating! Even though I cancelled my subs to NYT and WaPo bc of their coverage of the election it still irks me - the R's spin on crime is dangerous
If you watch much local news (like my wife does) they are why nearly two-thirds of us think crime is high or higher. It is formula news coverage, just like the 22-minutes of national news on ABC, CBS and NBC. Locally, there is a weather story, a traffic story, maybe a local disaster story or a disaster aftermath story, a national story, a local political story, a feel-good story, often a sports story, and always a crime story. Always. Local editors are lazy and they follow the police activity.
These are compelling statistics but they're much less compelling than one sensational story that grabs people by the gut. Trump knows this and sees an opportunity to advance his power even further by using the DOGE kid as representative of the overwhelming horrors of DC. How do you create a counter-example that signifies "safety"?
Great reporting Judd, so many have said it best…Mr Mangano,Ally,Katy,and John a.
Also, great added information from Theodora30.
Corporate media is poison.
Why does MediaBias FactCheck keep giving the New York Times a pass on their horrendously biased reporting?