ABC, CBS, and NBC doubled down early Tuesday in their dangerous and irresponsible narrative that crime is not an issue in Washington D.C., following suit from their pathetic coverage on their flagship Monday evening newscasts.
But on their flagship morning shows, they crucially brushed aside the nation’s capital having a crime problem while ignoring a murder in broad daylight in the Logan Circle area with the suspect only 17-years-old.
ABC’s Good Morning America followed suit from World News Tonight in tasking chief White House correspondent Mary Bruce to shovel this nothing-to-see-here attitude and again leave out the fact that a colleague of hers in ABC’s D.C. bureau was carjacked Monday morning.
After co-host Michael Strahan huffed that Trump “declar[ed] a crime emergency in our nation’s capital...even though the mayor says — the city’s mayor says violent crime is at a 30-year low,” Bruce falsely claimed Trump took “an extraordinary and historic step” to “seiz[e] control of Washington D.C.”
Fact-check: False. Trump is not actually taking over the city. If he were, Mayor Muriel Bowser and the City Council would no longer be in office.
“Now, the President claims crime here is out of control, but that’s not what the official figures show,” the white liberal and D.C.-area native added in another act of dismissal.
She then rattled off the crime statistics that are themselves in doubt:
The President is painting an apocalyptic picture of the nation’s capital, adamant crime is spiraling out of control, but the official figures show crime in the capital is actually in decline. Violent crime hitting a 30-year low, down 26 percent since last year. Burglary down 19 percent. Murder down 12 percent.
Bruce closed by bringing up the deployment of the National Guard and Trump reserving the ability “to go further and bring in additional military forces,” which led Strahan to invoke the left’s favorite holiday: “Yeah, that would have helped on January 6, Mary.”
Speaking of January 6, CBS Mornings had their former (and unofficial) J6 correspondent Scott MacFarlane on the case to tout D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s belief “that crime has been plummeting” and “new crime data showing violent crime has dropped 26 percent from this time last year, with homicides and robberies down, too” versus Trump “painting an ominous picture of neighborhoods in the nation’s capital.”
He doubled back from Monday’s CBS Evening News in holding up a former Bush/Obama/Trump 1 Homeland Security official to dismiss this as doing harm to the FBI’s ability to fight crime nationwide (click “expand”):
MACFARLANE: White House and congressional sources told CBS News the President’s order is expected to remain in place for 30 days. Nearly 500 federal agents including from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, have already been deployed, which former Homeland Security official Tom Warwick says is risky.
WARRICK: Taking FBI agents off of organized crime cases, terrorism, and other kinds of cases to do street patrols? That’s not the best use of a highly trained FBI agent.
MACFARLANE [TO WARRICK]: You think it could be a distraction?
WARRICK: It really looks as though a lot of this is performance.
MACFARLANE: The President has also threatened to expand his crackdown on crime in other U.S. cities. He named Chicago, Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, and Oakland, but the President doesn’t have the same authorities in those cities that he has in D.C. And Gayle, the Democratic mayors and governors in those communities are already pushing back hard on that idea.
Shifting to NBC’s Today, co-host Craig Melvin said Trump took “unprecedented” action to take over the city’s police and call up the D.C. National Guard even though “the mayor of Washington, D.C. and D.C.’s own police statistics appear to tell a different story” about crime being a crisis.
White House correspondent Garrett Haake took the reins from Gabe Gutierrez the night prior, which was rather unfortunate given Gutierrez’s balanced segment.
“Look, President Trump has long complained about what he sees as out of control crime in cities, especially here in Washington, D.C., regardless of what police statistics and local leaders may say to the contrary,” he opined.
He even took the step of holding up claims from House Democrats (courtesy of Jamie Raskin from CNN on Monday) that discussing crime in D.C. is a distraction from the Jeffrey Epstein case and added “D.C. police statistics show violent crime has fallen the last two years.”
The most he did to illustrate support for the move was from the D.C. police union, but even then he tried to poke holes in their side:
HAAKE: The head of D.C.’s police union says those statistics fail to capture the reality on the ground.
GREGGORY PEMBERTON: That’s not the reality we feel on the streets.
HAAKE: He says D.C.’s officers welcome short-term federal help, but need more officers and changes in local laws to make a difference. [TO PEMBERTON] Can you fundamentally fix the crime problem in D.C. in a month?
PEMBERTON: No, I don’t think so. I think you certainly can make an impact on the crime that would normally occur.
To see the relevant transcripts from August 12, click here (for ABC), here (for CBS), and here (for NBC).
