Abetting the Liars

How mainstream media keep failing us.

As we all know, the conservative media apparatus creates a fantasy universe Republicans can live in, one in which America is in a recession, white men are the most oppressed minority, and crime has never been higher. There are limits to what the rest of us can do about that. But most Americans don’t get their news directly from Fox News or Truth Social. Unfortunately, even after nine years of trying to figure out how to handle the most prodigious liar in the history of American politics, the mainstream news media still whiff again and again when given the opportunity to punish and deter dishonesty. Which only makes things worse.

Our case study today comes from Sunday’s edition of ABC News’ This Week, in which host Jonathan Karl interviewed Sen. Tim Scott, who was once a respected figure but has turned himself into one of the most pathetic of Donald Trump’s collection of sniveling toadies. Karl asked Scott whether he agreed with the Supreme Court’s recent ruling striking down the ATF’s regulation of bump stocks; Scott dodged that question to return to once of the GOP’s main themes as it attacks President Biden:

SCOTT: What we need to focus on, Jon, is the violence that we're seeing across this nation. Under Joe Biden we've seen the greatest increase in violent crime in my lifetime. And so focusing on ways for us to reduce that crime means getting four more years of Donald Trump. Under Donald Trump we actually respected law enforcement. Under Joe Biden, we've seen the movement to defund the police, leaving communities like the one I grew up in devastated and ravaged by a wave of violent crime that we have not seen literally in five decades.

KARL: Actually, senator as I – as you probably know, the latest stats on violent crime and on the murder rate, they're actually down this past year. But let me get back to my question about the Supreme Court's decision…

Scott was just lying about what has happened to crime rates, which I’ll get to in a moment. But here’s the move at work:

1. Lie about what your opponents believe, in this case, that Democrats want to “defund the police,” a position held by only a handful of Democrats and which the party as a whole has aggressively disavowed

2. Lie about what happened, that across the country, police departments were defunded, when in fact just a few departments here and there redirected some small portion of their funds after 2020, but most quickly reversed whatever cuts were made

3. Lie about what is happening right now, that we’re living in a time of unprecedented crime because of the thing that never happened

This creates a fictional world you and your supporters can inhabit, one where they just know that crime is out of control. Before I get to why Karl’s response to Scott’s blizzard of falsehood is the most infuriating thing about this, let’s quickly review the facts.

The dramatic crime drop

This is the story of crime in America over the last few years: First, there was a dramatic increase in many kinds of crimes in 2020, when Donald Trump, I repeat, Donald Trump was president. The president doesn’t have much if any impact on whether crime goes up or down in the short term, but this spike was because of the pandemic, and one might argue that Trump does bear responsibility given his pathetic response to the crisis. In any case, by most measures, crime then started to recede back to where it had been before the pandemic, falling in 2021, falling more in 2022, and falling yet more in 2023. This all happened when Joe Biden was president. Things for 2024 look even better:

The rate of violent and property crimes dropped precipitously in the first three months of 2024 compared to the same period last year, according to quarterly statistics released Monday by the FBI known as the Uniform Crime Report.

The murder rate fell by 26.4%, reported rapes decreased by 25.7%, robberies fell by 17.8%, aggravated assault fell by 12.5%, and the overall violent crime rate went down by 15.2%, the statistics show.

Reported property crimes also decreased by 15.1%, according to the UCR report, which the FBI compiles using crime statistics supplied to the agency by law enforcement agencies across the U.S.

The story is that there was a crime spike under Donald Trump, then a crime drop under Joe Biden. It’s simple. So not only is Tim Scott lying about what has happened nationwide, he gets specific, saying the defunding of police has left “communities like the one I grew up in devastated.” 

Let’s examine that claim, shall we?

Scott grew up in North Charleston, South Carolina, which, you will not be surprised to learn, did not defund its police when Joe Biden became president. In fact, the city’s police budget has increased every year that Biden has been in office. You can look it up. 

Now how about crime? You can look up the data for that too. North Charleston is indeed a place where there is a lot of crime. But crime rates there have been high for a long time, and have been decreasing, rather than increasing, during Biden’s presidency, after spiking in 2020, when, to repeat, Donald Trump was president. 

Frankly, I doubt Tim Scott is aware of these facts; he’s a busy guy, so I’d guess he just decided to claim his home town has been “devastated” by Biden’s permissive crime policies, knowing that no interviewer will be aware of the facts either, and won’t bother to challenge him on it. Which was a correct assumption. 

Where the problem gets worse

Now we return to the heart of the problem. How does Jonathan Karl react when Scott lies to him and his viewers? “As you probably know, the latest stats on violent crime and on the murder rate, they're actually down this past year,” he says, and then moves back to the bump stock question. 

“As you probably know”? That means Karl is assuming, almost certainly correctly, that Scott is lying and not just mistaken. But rather than stopping there and pressing him — for instance, saying “Hang on, Senator. You and I both know that what you just said is false. Crime is down under Joe Biden, not up. Will you admit the truth?” — he slides right by it and moves back to the question he wanted to ask before.

What should a journalist do in a situation like this? It’s not hard: When a politician lies right in your face, don’t act as though it didn’t happen. Karl should have kept pressing Scott on this lie until he admitted it. And if he wouldn’t, Karl should have said, “Senator, we’re not going any farther. I’m not going to let you lie to my audience. This is the last time you’ll be invited on this program.”

Not only would that have meant standing up for the truth, it would have been great TV! Instead, he just quickly noted the truth (or part of it) and moved on. The message that sends to Scott and people like him is that there is no cost to lying. They won’t be confronted or challenged in any meaningful way, let alone humiliated, and they’ll be able to get their own message across and reinforce the fictional reality in which their supporters reside.

There are times when it’s difficult to correct politicians in real time; this is the issue interviewers have had with Trump, who will lie in literally every sentence that comes out of his mouth. But here’s a case where the interviewer had the facts at his disposal, knew for certain that the interviewee was lying, and just let him do it. As a result, the widespread false belief that crime is rising was reinforced.

Part of the problem is that journalists start from the presumption that what the politician says is the most important thing, not the truth of what they’re saying. So when Trump goes to Detroit and portrays it as a hellhole of crime when in fact the city has made extraordinary progress — 2023 had the fewest homicides there since 1966 — the headline about the appearance in the Washington Post reads not “Trump lies about Detroit, where crime is down,” but “Trump portrays rampant crime in speech at Black church in Detroit.” Imagine if they treated the truth as the main story, and what politicians say as part of the story, but not necessarily the main part.

In a better world, Tim Scott would be treated as a pariah by every respectable news organization, forever scarred by the moral depths to which he has sunk in making himself another soulless handmaid of the most dishonest and corrupt politician in American history. And journalists — especially the ones with the most influential platforms — would make sure every politician knows they won’t be allowed to use those platforms to deceive the public. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in.