Rates of violence have not fallen to zero, so there is always enough violence to fill the news, making subjective impressions diverge from statistics.

The claim has three parts: rates of violence are above zero; news coverage is therefore always full of violence; and public perceptions of violence differ from what statistics show. True: as of 2012, data show that violence persists, and survey research shows the public misjudges violence trends (e.g. Gallup polls where most Americans believed crime was rising while it was falling), with research on news selection linking media coverage to this. Mostly true: the perception gap and persistent violence are documented, but the causal role of the news is only partly supported. Mixed: the perception gap is documented but the media mechanism is contested, or the reverse. Mostly false: perceptions are found to track statistics fairly well, though there is some bias. False: the evidence shows that subjective impressions match statistical reality.

Set before the research began.

1. E1 Public perceptions of crime in England and Wales: year ending March 2016 Office for National Statistics · 6 September 2017

   “While the level of crime measured by the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) has been falling since a peak in 1995, the survey has consistently shown that most people perceive that crime across the country as a whole has still been rising”

2. E2 Public perceptions of crime in England and Wales: year ending March 2016 Office for National Statistics · 6 September 2017

   “However, when people formed perceptions of crime across the whole country their main source of information was the media.”

3. E3 Criminal Victimization, 2011 Bureau of Justice Statistics (U.S. Department of Justice) · 17 October 2012

   “The rate of violent victimization increased 17%, from 19.3 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older in 2010 to 22.5 in 2011.”

4. E4 Crime, News and Fear of Crime: Toward an Identification of Audience Effects Social Problems (Oxford Academic; Society for the Study of Social Problems) · 1 August 1997

   “Controlling for age, gender, race, victim experience and other perceptions of crime, the frequency of watching television news and listening to news on the radio is significantly related to FEAR.”

E3 (BJS, October 2012) reports a U.S. violent victimization rate of 22.5 per 1,000 in 2011, which confirms that violence had not fallen to zero. E1 (ONS) reports that crime surveys have consistently found most people believe national crime is rising, even though measured crime has fallen since 1995. That documents the perception gap over the years before 2012. On the news mechanism, E2 finds that the media were people's main source for views on national crime, and E4 links watching TV news to fear of crime. Neither shows directly that news coverage causes misjudged trends, so the media's causal role is only partly supported.