NYT Helps Right-Wing Media Spin Pelosi Attack as Story About San Francisco "Crime Wave”

Other political assassination attempts are not put in the context of broader local crime statistics. So why was this one?

photo by Alexandros Michailidis

It’s was as predictable as the tides that Fox News, Daily Caller, and Washington Free Beacon would make an attempted assassination attempt on Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi not about far-right radicalization (for which we have ample evidence) or the false narrative pushed out by former President Trump and QAnon media that Democrats are child trafficking demons, but about a “crime wave” in far-left, radical, Soft on Crime San Fransisco.

But The New York Times helping affirm this narrative shows how much the bipartisan media obsession with pinning any and all crime on progressive prosecutors has gone.

In this ostensibly straight report from Thursday detailing the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, Times reporters Kellen Browning, Tim Arango, Luke Broadwater, and Holly Secon go out of their way to put the blame, at least in part, on San Francisco's progressive now-ex DA Chesa Boudin, who was recalled over four months ago:

For San Francisco, the break-in and assault comes at a time when the city is awash in crises over crime and disorder in the streets, where open-air drug dealing is commonplace and concerns over burglaries, especially in wealthy neighborhoods, helped fuel the successful recall of the city’s avowed progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, this year. 

None of the claims come with links citing any evidence, because San Francisco, empirically, was not “awash in a crises over crime and disorder” during the tenure of Boudin. It was, however, awash in a media narrative about the appearance or feeling that it is. Data shows that during the time in question property crime was down and some violent crimes, including murder, were up—which was consistent with every other jurisdiction in the U.S., regardless of the party or ideology of the district attorneys in question. 

But The Times couldn’t help but feed a meta-narrative popular on the right and played on loop on Fox News that Pelosi, as an avatar for the wacky progressive left—despite her being consistently for funding and defending police—somehow Had It Coming.

The Times is going out of its way to take an ideological pot shot at so-called progressive prosecutors, who the paper has been demagoguing against for the better part of two years. One way we know this for certain is because, for previous attempts on the lives of high profile politicians, the New York Times hasn’t gone out of its way to note broader “crime” trends, since, to any morally sensible person, attempts at political assassination aren’t “crime trend” stories—but are entirely unrelated. 

Let’s look at previous high profile examples:

• Despite violent crime increasing in Virginia in 2016, the New York Times report on the shooting of House GOP Whip Steve Scalise in June 2017 made no mention of this broader crime trends in Virginia, or Alexandria specifically. 

• Despite violent crime increasing in the D.C. metro area in 2021, none of the New York Times’ dozens of articles detailing the January 6 rioters’ attempts at harming or killing Democratic members of Congress mention broader crime trends in the D.C. metro area. 

• Despite violent crime increasing in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area in 2022, the New York Times report on a foiled ISIS plot to assassinate former President George W. Bush in Dallas made no mention of broader crime trends in the Dallas area.  

So, what makes this political assassination attempt different from all others? Why did The New York Times feel the need to go out of its way and put someone trying to kill the Speaker of the House who just happens to live in San Francisco in the context of local crime of San Francisco? Because it’s San Francisco, and San Francisco, as I’ve noted elsewhere, isn’t a place so much as an idea, an ideological watch word, a glib and cheap bludgeon evoking “soft on crime” policy Gone Too Far. So it gets a snide paragraph, because no opportunity for media institutions to reaffirm conservative assumptions about crime can go to waste.