How Do You Win Policy Battles That Are Fake?
Fake News --> Fake Problems --> Fake Solutions --> ???
One model for thinking about using government policy to address problems and win elections might be:
There is a serious societal problem.
The news media and concerned citizens bring attention to that problem.
The government crafts a solution and implements their policy.
People notice that the problem is solved, and reward the political party which solved the problem.
Some policy issues fit neatly into this model, but plenty don’t for a variety of reasons. Consider a different model:
Bad faith political actors invent a problem out of whole cloth. No basis in reality whatsoever.
Partisan media outside of the mainstream repeat ad nauseam that this is a problem, whipping one side into a fervor.
The mainstream media sees polling which shows that some appreciable percent of society cares about the fake problem, so they cover it as a somewhat real problem.
The government feels pressured to do something about the problem and takes a highly visible symbolic action to solve the problem.
Bad faith political actors use the government response to validate the existence of the problem and further enflame people.
This seems like a suboptimal loop to find yourself in, but it happens shockingly often.
One recent example: Manhattan Is A Crime Ridden Hellhole vs Manhattan Is One Of The Safest Counties An America
By pretty much any objective measure, Manhattan is one of the safest places to live in the country. It’s true that crime ticked up slightly during and after the pandemic — like it did almost everywhere in the country — but it’s also true that Manhattan is a very safe place. There is ample statistical evidence for this, you can check for yourself.
However, for political reasons, Republicans love to pretend that any city run by a Democrat is a crime infested wasteland. There are Democratic-led cities which have rising crime problems, but the most frequently cited example, NYC, is not one of them. This leads to a wide chorus of conservative media voices endlessly repeating that NYC is unsafe. From conservative media, the story makes the leap over to the mainstream media for a few reasons:
Stories about crime do well with viewers: “if it bleeds, it leads.” Even with the gutting of local news throughout the country, police and crime is one of the few verticals still going strong everywhere.
In 2022, New York Republicans campaigned on public safety issues and did surprisingly well, which gives the appearance that voters care a lot about crime, which enables mainstream reporters to cover it as a matter of concern.
On some level, all crime is bad. Even if crime is historically low, any number of murders above zero is bad, so it’s hard to complain about public safety stories.
In a city as large as New York, it’s easy to find 3-4 examples of anything in order to create the appearance of a trend.
Figure 1: NYC and national homicide rate per 100,000 over time
So even though crime was relatively low compared to the rest of the country, and massively lower than the city’s historical levels, there was pressure to address public safety in New York City.
Mayor Adams took action, regularly talking up the city’s crime problem in the news and putting cops at busy subway stations to check bags and stare ominously at tourists.
It doesn’t take a policy genius to realize that neither of those things is particularly likely to stop crime. But they are explicitly designed to make it look like you’re doing something about crime.
The first model of policy response I laid out would see Mayor Adams and New York Democrats rewarded for focusing on public safety. In the second model however, you’d see conservative media pounce on the Democratic leadership’s admission that the city is unsafe.
Most coverage of Mayor Adams himself from right wing media has continued to be abysmal, on public safety issues and elsewhere. Here’s the generally awful coverage from FOX and Breitbart, and the slightly less unfavorable coverage from the New York Post. Other conservative outlets tell a similar story. But even beyond his own coverage, his singleminded focus on crime has been used to justify ongoing coverage and specifically to attack other Democrats on the issue:
Here’s Axios on how Biden and Adams are “fighting over immigration and crime — and Adams' willingness to publicly criticize the administration.” The story notes that “many Republicans and conservatives have used [Adams’ rhetoric] to attack the Biden administration.”
Here’s Spectrum 1 NY on how Adams’ public safety language specifically hurt Governor Hochul in her surprisingly narrow 2022 reelection bid.
The NYT makes a similar point: “Last year, his language on crime mirrored attacks by New York Republicans as they helped flip the House and mounted a strong challenge to Gov. Kathy Hochul.”
Mayor Adams took the bait, started shadowboxing with a fake problem, and accidentally elevated the issue enough that he is handing political wins to the right wing partisans who started the whole mess.
Big Picture
I don’t think every right wing grievance is based on whole cloth lies. Obviously. But it’s hard to not see how often this comes up. From bad faith attacks about Ebola as a 2014 midterms October surprise, to fear mongering about immigrant crimes,1 there are a lot of GOP attacks that are just kinda bullshit. And when Democrats play into those attacks, we elevate the issue and create a permission structure for the press to cover it and for people to care about it, increasing the likelihood that we lose.
The campus protests for Palestine were overwhelmingly peaceful. But local police departments choosing to break them up with force created tons of footage of cops beating up college students, which makes it really easy for disinterested voters to conclude that the police were intervening because of actual violence from the students, rather than merely GOP claims that the students were being violent.
There’s no perfect answer here. The existence of FOX — an unapologetic GOP propaganda machine — guarantees that Republicans will be able to elevate lies into serious issues that some voters care about. Ignoring those issues isn’t a sustainable strategy. But when Democrats go out of our way to validate these lies, we lose.
Housekeeping Notes
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Both documented and undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower levels than natural-born US citizens.