The headlines of 2025 painted a portrait of America in chaos, driven by the financial logic of America’s media ecosystem. It’s number one product isn’t news, but fear.
“NYC youth crime doubled since controversial state Raise the Age Law kicked in,” exclaims one hysterical New York Post headline from September. “Business owners express frustration over crime surge in Federal Hill,” reads a banner from FOX45 News, a local outlet in Baltimore. “Office shooter’s rampage shows terrifying rise of motive-free violence, experts warn,” goes a Fox News heading from August.
The scary headlines were all underscored by inflammatory rhetoric from the Trump administration, which continued to insist that America’s cities are crime-ridden hell holes well into the new year.
Selective media coverage of crime certainly isn’t a new phenomenon, though it’s worth revisiting — especially because new data suggests 2025 was actually one of the least violent years for the US in over a century.
According to fresh Council on Criminal Justice crime statistics, Axios reports, murder rates fell 21 percent last year across the 35 largest cities in the US. It’s the single largest one-year-drop ever, the publication reports, and possibly the lowest homicide rates we’ve seen as a nation since the year 1900 — when the last generation of frontier outlaws were still robbing train cars.
Homicide wasn’t the only crime that fell in 2025. Out of 13 crimes tracked by the Council on Criminal Justice, 11 of them were lower last year than in 2024. Aggravated assaults, for example, fell by 9 percent across the 35 cities, while gun assaults and robberies dropped off by 22 and 23 percent, respectively. (The only category that increased was drug crimes, up 7 percent — and which are nonviolent.)
To sum up it all up: the sensationalized crime coverage dominating the evening news stands in stark, frustrating contrast to the actual data. In 2026, American media is dominated by just six billion-dollar media conglomerates, an arrangement which has held for well over a decade.
Under this system, news becomes commodified — clicks and views drive revenue, the core function of any business. Media companies have a financial incentive to churn out hysterical headlines and “Nightcrawler”-esque violence porn over rational breakdowns of actual statistics, nevermind the social and financial conditions that give rise to crime.
With so many Americans reliant on the commercialized news cycle for information about the world, it’s no wonder our politics are still steeped in debates over “law and order,” driven by a crisis that doesn’t seem to exist.
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