Our whole stupid discourse—liberal and conservative—summed up in one Fox News clip.

Five neatly coifed Fox News anchors sit in the network’s studio in Midtown Manhattan. The women, in dresses that end just above the knee and knife-sharp heels, cross their legs identically, flanking the much older Brit Hume.

They’re discussing the New York City’s decline into a degenerate hellhole.

“You were here in the ‘70s and it’s like that now. It’s very random and very chaotic here,” Harris Faulkner tells Hume. In the background a clean-energy bus with an I Heart New York sign lumbers by in an orderly manner. Pedestrians amble past.

“Yeah the streets are chaotic,” concurs Hume, as tourists crowd in the background, smiling and snapping pictures. “The noise … the smell… the smell of marijuana…. it’s everywhere” he kvetches. There he may have a point, as the dorky tourist in the white hat and sun glasses grinning and waving around his phone might definitely be high. “It does remind me of the mess here in the ‘70s,” he concludes.

In 1973, there were 2,040 murders in New York and 135,468 incidents of violent crime. There were 678,881 property crimes. In 2019 there were 558, according to the same index, and 69,764 property crimes. That’s before the surge in homicides in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. As Radley Balko notes, they rose again in 2021 but at a slower rate and may have started falling in 2022. Property crime fell in 2020 and then began to rise as lockdowns loosened. In other words, New York today is nothing like the ‘70s.

Justin Baragona @justinbaragona

They are literally broadcasting from the streets of New York as he says this

As media critic Oliver Willis observed, this is precisely why Democrats should stop trying to win over conservatives—they’d literally believe Fox News anchors over their own eyes.

perfect example of fox news newspeak. their audience will never make the connection between "liberal ny is a crime ridden hellhole" and the boring ass backdrop to the fox broadcast. this is why the fox audience is not reachable and dems shouldnt try.

But it’s not a Fox News problem. It’s an “everyone in media” problem, with the exception of the handful of criminal justice lunatics who spend their work and free time poring over crime data and reports.

We can eye-roll at Fox News, but what about The Atlantic, New York Magazine, and The New Yorker? Because before and after the recall of former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin, all of these liberal outlets published multiple stories painting San Francisco as, yes, a degenerate hellhole.