"Tune into right-wing America's favorite network, and you'd get the strong impression that leaving your house, especially in any major city, is the equivalent of walking into a war zone," Salon's Amanda Marcotte wrote in 2021. Marcotte was referring to the tendency of Fox News to cover the "nonexistent" crime wave in American cities, in turn propagandizing to its viewers about the notion that violent crime was out of control. Hosts of the Rupert Murdoch-owned news channel rave about "coast-to-coast crime crisis" and "suggested it was impossible to walk 'down the street in any major liberal city' without getting murdered."
But peculiarly, data hasn't borne out their claims. Recent research, which was reported on in Salon, found that Republican-controlled parts of America have worse gun violence than Democrat-controlled areas, typically because gun control laws follow a red-blue divide. Indeed, studies performed by everyone from academic researchers to the magazine Newsweek yield the same conclusion: In areas with looser gun control, there is more gun violence.
