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Fox News Called Out as ‘Disgraceful Garbage’ Over Crime Claim
In a Super Tuesday segment on crime, Fox News reporter Katie Pavlich claimed “crime is up,” despite multiple reports, including FBI statistics, that show over the past two years crime has plummeted.
“Homicides dropped by over 10% in America’s biggest cities in 2023,” CNN reported in January.
“Violent crime is dropping fast in the U.S. — even if Americans don’t believe it,” NPR reported last month.
“America’s Peace Wave,” was the late December 2023 headline at The Atlantic, which reported, “Sky-high violent-crime rates of recent years have suddenly—mercifully—plummeted.”
“Crime in almost every category went down across U.S. in 2023, FBI reports,” according to NBC News in December of 2023. Days earlier, NBC reported: “Most people think the U.S. crime rate is rising. They’re wrong.”
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“Crime on the Decline” The New York Times reported in an article originally titled, “U.S. Crime Rate Fell in 2023.”
According to The Times, “the data over the past year has offered a much more optimistic picture. The number of murders in U.S. cities fell by more than 12 percent — which would be the biggest national decline on record. The spike that started in 2020 now looks more like a blip, and the murder rate is lower than it was during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. The recent data also suggests that the violent-crime rate in 2023 was near its lowest level in more than 50 years, as Jeff Asher, a crime analyst, wrote for his newsletter.”
But according to Fox News, the statistics are wrong.
Fox News’ John Roberts on Tuesday told Pavlich, “you made the point that one of the reasons for declining crime is that a lot of these soft on crime prosecutors are either reducing charges, letting people out with no charges or declining to prosecute more serious crimes.”
But the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR) isn’t a report on charges or prosecutions, it’s a report of reported crimes.
“Exactly,” Pavlich agreed, before suggesting the statistics are intentionally wrong. “I mean that statistics are only reflective of what is put into the system, right? So if you have a number of prosecutors across the country who are downgrading serious felonies, to misdemeanors that makes it look like violent crime or burglaries like you’re seeing on the side of your screen that are taking place aren’t really happening.”
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“But when you go outside and walk around in these cities, or you ask people, they will say they know somebody who’s been a victim of a crime or they’ve been in a store like this where people come in and they grab all these goods, and then that of course deteriorates into a bigger situation where stores leave, there is no economic opportunity in certain neighborhoods, and therefore there is even more crime that continues to occur in the spiral. And so this is something that both Donald Trump is talking about and Joe Biden,” Pavlich said.
“Donald Trump when he was in office, he had operation LEGEND which of course was a partnership between the Department of Justice and local law enforcement, local mayor’s offices, to try and solve murders, for example, and to put federal charges onto some of these criminals because a local D.A. charges really weren’t enough to scare them into not going into these repeat offender situations.”
“So we’ll see more of this as the campaign moves on, but in terms of what has been happening over the past three years crime is up,” Pavlich insisted. “People are feeling it.”
Jared Holt, a senior researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, called the Fox News segment “vibes-based analysis.”
Teddy Wilson, who reports on the radical right via his Substack newsletter, writes: “This rhetoric is part of a much larger narrative perpetuated by right-wing media and GOP politicians, and is connected to anti-immigrant rhetoric.”
“The Message: White people in the suburbs should be afraid, because the scary Black and Brown people are coming to your neighborhood.”
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Indeed, Media Matters last week reported, “Fox News’ attempt to manufacture a Biden crime crisis runs into a problem: Violent crime is down.”
Longtime journalist John Harwood, formerly of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, NBC News, and CNN, wrote, “so when they’re going up, crime stats are real when they’re going down, the stats are fake instead, they’ll just use random videos of crimes by members of minority groups.”
He concluded: “disgraceful garbage enterprise.”
Watch the Fox News segment below or at this link.
So how is Fox News dealing with the drop in crime over the last couple of years? They’re now saying the stats are fake.
“Statistics are reflective of what is put into the system… in terms of what is happening over the past 3 years, crime is up, people are feeling it.” pic.twitter.com/aZusvq3OPd
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) March 5, 2024
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Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Graham Platner is under fire after releasing a video declaring that new allegations against him are false, yet he is “taking time to reflect” on a path forward.
Politico on Monday afternoon reported that a woman who dated Platner, Jenny Racicot, “says he forced her to have sex with him nearly five years ago despite her repeated objections, an allegation Platner denies.”
“Racicot said she had an on-and-off relationship with Platner,” Politico reported, “for more than two years before he entered her rural Maine home uninvited one night in late 2021, deeply intoxicated, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. She said she cut off contact with him after telling him the encounter was not consensual.”
In a video posted to social media eleven minutes after the Politico story dropped, Platner says, “I wanted to directly address the troubling, serious, and false allegations against me. Any accusation of nonconsensual behavior is categorically false.”
He said he and his supporters “were united in a love of Maine, a belief that our politics must change, in a focus on defeating Susan Collins.”
“So, regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful the political reality will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward for the state that I love, the people that I love, the movement I belong to, and the goal of defeating Susan Collins.”
“Those were the goals when we launched this campaign. And they remain my goals today.”
“Throughout it all, you never turned your back on me. And I will not turn my back on you now. Every one of you deserves to see that vision come to fruition and see Susan Collins defeated. And we will use every tool at our disposal to do so.”
The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, a political commentator who served as the communications director for the Jeb Bush 2016 presidential campaign, blasted Platner.
“I’m sorry but ‘we are taking time to reflect on the best path forward’ is not an option on the table,” Miller wrote. “Either it’s false and you campaign with vigor or it’s true and you get out / apologize to everyone you let down.”
Journalist Ryan Grim, commenting on Platner’s video, noted that Platner “strongly suggests he is considering dropping out. Already Troy Jackson and Chellie Pingree, both gubernatorial candidates, are being kicked around in Maine circles as potential replacements.”
Several others, including Puck News’ Peter Hamby, predicted Platner will be dropping out.
Platner had postponed several campaign events before the Politico story was published.
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) July 6, 2026
President Donald Trump is facing backlash after posting a video of children — including showing their unblurred faces — graduating from kindergarten, with some of the girls purportedly wearing hijabs.
“President Trump posted a captionless video of graduating kindergarteners on Truth Social on Monday, goading his supporters into verbally attacking little children simply for being Muslim,” The New Republic reported. “The clip is from Gateway STEM Academy, a majority-Black K-8 public charter school in St. Paul, Minnesota. It shows about 21 children in caps and gowns on stage singing a song together. Most of the girls are wearing hijabs.”
The original post of the video which Trump reposted reads: “Public school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Every girl is in a hijab … in kindergarten.”
Trump did not add any comments. TNR called the post “Islamophobic, weird, and creepy,” while noting that the comments section of Trump’s post was filled with calls “by racist, xenophobic MAGA supporters” to “deport the children and ban hijabs.”
TNR also noted that it “should come as no surprise that Trump isn’t above attacking children who just learned how to read, but this post is still particularly discomforting—and will certainly contribute to the already potent level of anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. and in Minnesota.”
Critics blasted Trump.
“There is something deeply unsettling about the president of the United States—the most powerful person in the world—going after kindergarten schoolchildren in Minnesota because they wore hijabs, as Trump has done this morning on his website,” The Bulwark’s Sam Stein wrote.
One social media commentator wrote, “Trump posted an unblurred video of more than a dozen Muslim kindergartners to Truth Social, exposing the children’s faces while targeting them for their religion.”
Another added, “Trump is a bigot. The president took to Truth Social to attack kindergarteners in hijabs. These are little kids. The president isn’t just a bigot, he’s also a coward.”
The original video was posted to the X social media platform in June.
U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) at the time commented, “If you are in a public school in America, you should be speaking english.”
Image via Reuters
President Donald Trump’s apparent efforts to delay releasing the $5.8 million civil judgment to E. Jean Carroll are being met with a warning by the journalist’s legal team, who suggest there could be a legal maneuver for Trump to employ to forgo paying the judgment in either of the two cases he lost.
According to The Guardian, on July 4, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered Trump to release the $5.8 million judgment, which is in escrow, to Carroll by this coming Tuesday — or explain why he would not do so.
Carroll’s attorneys think Trump may be trying to buy time to mount another legal strategy, telling the judge that Trump’s request for an extension “appears to be little more than yet another play for time.”
“The case is separate from Trump’s appeal of a Manhattan civil jury’s 2024 award of $83.3m to Carroll for defamation,” The Guardian explains. “But her lawyers have suggested a legal scenario in which the president might seek to conjoin the cases and further delay payment of both.”
Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan (no relation to the judge) wrote, “We can only assume that defendant is seeking … to buy time so he can try to concoct some new basis to put off paying plaintiff presumably in connection with his forthcoming petition and motion for a rehearing.”
Trump’s former attorney, Justin Smith, in one of his final acts, wrote to the Supreme Court suggesting that his client would be appealing the $83.3 million civil judgment.
Smith argued that the Supreme Court “may wish to consider the petitions together,” given they involve the same parties.
The larger judgment case involves possible questions of presidential immunity, and that has Carroll’s attorneys concerned.
“A conjoined case, Carroll’s lawyers fear, could result in both judgments being wiped out,” The Guardian reports.
The president has also made clear he is no fan of Judge Kaplan, after the jurist made several rulings that “angered” Trump.
“What else can you expect from a Trump Hating, Clinton appointed judge, who went out of his way to make sure that the result was as negative as it could possible be,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in 2023, “speaking to, and in control of, a jury from an anti-Trump area which is probably the worst place in the US for me to get a fair ‘trial’.”
Image via Reuters
Platner Scorched Over ‘Taking Time’ Video After New Accusation
Trump Sparks Fury Online After Posting Unblurred Video of Muslim Kindergartners in Hijabs
One Legal Maneuver Threatens to Undo Everything E. Jean Carroll Won
Inside the Group Helping MAGA Voters Walk Away — And What Finally Pushed Them
