By Ed West, Wrong Side of History
News diets in a post-literate society
I find it odd when I occasionally hear Americans expressing anxiety about visiting European cities because of the crime. Yes, your mobile phone may be stolen, and no, the police won’t bother investigating it, and yes London’s mayor is pretty useless. But the chances of something really horrible happening to you are very small, and you have little to worry about when it comes to Muslims, despite the impression social media might give you. In fact British Muslims have crime rates pretty close to the average, although it varies by group, and considerably lower homicide rates than white or even Asian-Americans.
Twitter can give a pretty misleading impression of life in different countries, when in reality nowhere in Britain is really a no-go zone; the only western European city which comes close to US levels of violence is Marseilles, which has a murder rate about three-fifths that of New York.
I say this with some anxiety as I prepare to take my family to the Big Apple next month, where I slightly dread the prospect of an insane Michael Jackson impersonator screaming at me on the subway. This concern has undoubtedly been heightened by my social media diet, and I’m fairly confident that I won’t be murdered, especially as violent crime tends to be concentrated in areas I intend to avoid.
This sense of anxiety is made worse by the knowledge that anyone hoping to intervene in such situations faces a. being stabbed or b. having their life ruined by a dishonest and malicious media.
That dishonesty reached its nadir in the weeks after May 25, 2020, during a period that left a deep imprint on millions of people. Stuck at home, we saw on our screen baffling scenes of mass hysteria and violent disorder, then followed by one of the steepest increases in violence seen in any peace time nation. The US murder rate rose by 30 per cent as police forces retreated in the face of an overwhelmingly hostile media pushing the narrative that they were systemically racist. Thousands of people ended up dead as a result, the starkest illustration of identity politics politics having real-world consequences.