Somebody finally got Kathy Hochul to belatedly accept an important lesson: Elected leaders should listen to their constituents instead of listening to left-wing Twitter. A bunch of those voices on the left have been insisting that actually, crime is a made-up issue ginned up by a conspiracy of right-wing media. So, we have Brian Beutler of Crooked arguing that “I can think of two possible explanations for a shift like that. One is that crime and inflation became perceptibly worse since August (which would justify a sustained shift in media focus). The other is that mass media started fixating on those topics independent of any significant change in material reality (but perhaps because Republicans uncorked a propaganda). . . . Journalists should do better. I think they should be able to recognize that crime is falling; that their outlets are awash in crime coverage anyhow because they’ve been manipulated; that Republicans willed a crime panic into existence, the same way they willed an Ebola panic into existence in 2014, and caravan panics into existence in more recent elections.” (Yes, there really are people who have committed themselves to claiming that Democrats lost nine Senate seats in 2014 because of “an Ebola panic.”) Beutler’s rant against covering violent crime was echoed by Greg Sargent of the Washington Post and by Radley Balko, who argues that it is good news that “There were 8 murders on the NYC subway last year.” Of course, none of these people trot out data when each individual case of an unarmed black man being killed by police gets thousands of times more coverage than other killings; they feel that massively disproportionate coverage benefits their side.
In any event, it would be hard to be more tone-deaf in following the lead of these people than Governor Hochul was on Sunday on Al Sharpton’s radio show, telling Sharpton, “These are master manipulators. They have this conspiracy going all across America trying to convince people in Democratic states that they’re not as safe.” Well, even in New York, it’s never a good idea to go full Brian Beutler. In an interview on NY1 yesterday, Hochul admitted that the crime problem is real and a legitimate concern: “I acknowledge there is a crime issue. It’s not new to me because it’s election time; I’ve been working on this throughout my entire time as governor.” It really is astounding that anybody could be so bad at politics that they needed to be forced into admitting this.