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How Local Crime News Manufactures Fear and Panic
Isn’t it curious how the very institutions tasked with informing us often distort the landscape they claim to navigate? A recent Pew Research Center survey illustrates this disturbing tendency, particularly when it comes to the public’s perception of crime.
We’re told that 77% of adults rely on local crime news, and that a staggering 33% of frequent consumers are “extremely or very concerned” about crime affecting their lives. But if you peel back the layers of this comforting blanket of supposedly objective data, what we really find is a systemic feeding of irrational fears, bolstering the perception that we are in far greater danger than we truly are.
Let’s be clear: this survey’s conclusions, while straightforward, serve as a smokescreen. The headline data — people consume local crime news, and frequent exposure correlates with heightened fear — leads us to think that people are rational actors responding to an obvious rise in crime. But this is a myopic and dangerously simplistic reading of the facts.
Here’s the first paradox: crime rates, particularly violent ones, have plummeted since 1993. The fear people report is not tethered to actuality, but to the distortion of actuality. Despite official crime statistics showing a significant decline, Americans continue to believe crime is on the rise. Why? The media — especially television — manufactures fear through a cycle of disproportionate crime reporting, which results in a feedback loop of heightened concern.
The function of news, once to inform, has transmogrified into one that incites. Even more alarming is that this is not a bug but a feature of the modern information economy. Crime, like fear, sells. It doesn’t merely sell news subscriptions or ad placements on TV; it sells a certain worldview — one of disorder, chaos, and the perennial lurking threat of violence.
Let us interrogate the role of the news industry, particularly local outlets, in this economy of fear. They serve not merely as conveyors of fact but as active participants in an unholy alliance with entertainment culture, where violence and disorder are romanticized, perpetually keeping…
