Since President Trump's announced federal crackdown on crime in Washington, D.C. earlier this week, a repeated talking point in the legacy media is that violent crime is actually down in D.C. over the past couple of years. The problem is that likely isn't true. Many in that same media, including NBC News, reported earlier this year that a D.C. police commander was suspended for manipulating data to make it appear violent crime had fallen considerably. However, with very few exceptions that detail was left out of reporting this week on liberal outlets, which used those same D.C. statistics to push the "falling crime" narrative. "We counted 73 uses in 24 hours of these questionable stats from a cop who was suspended for cooking the books," says Tim Graham, executive director of NewsBusters at the Media Research Center.
A NewsBusters analysis found the false crime stats repeatedly used on CNN and MSNBC in the first 24 hours after Trump's announcement, with only CNN conservative commentator Scott Jennings mentioning the data was phony. But that's not the only narrative they were pushing. "We also counted 31 citations of January 6, as if that somehow is a rebuttal," says Graham. "Like, let's just equate violent crime in D.C. to January 6."
This pattern of selective fact-checking and fuzzy math has become all too familiar in the anti-Trump media. "These cable networks that crusade against Trump saying they just provide the facts, then when you show the facts they're using are in dispute, they can't even acknowledge there's an actual dispute," says Graham.
"The most comical thing about all of this is for them to try to say the violent crime problem in D.C. has been fixed, even if the actual numbers are down slightly," he continues. "They're like we only had 170 murders...that's success?"
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