There is a retail crime wave terrorizing regular Americans — if you’re tuned in to conservative media.
It can be difficult to gauge whether that is true, if shoplifting really is at a high. Some places, like Detroit, have online databases with recent crime statistics, but there is no national database where members of the public can see if retail crime specifically is rising or falling.
The term retailers use to describe merchandise loss is “shrink,” a measure that includes theft from customers but also from employees, lost merchandise and unfulfilled orders. Last week, the National Retail Federation put out a report saying organized retail crime accounted for nearly half of overall shrink. This week, the group walked it back.
Our picture of reality is hazy. Flip the channel to Fox News, though, and the crisis has been portrayed as a dire one.
Fox and outlets like The New York Post dutifully cover what seems to be every dramatic video of a robbery they can get a hold of. They cover retail executives who cite an increase in shoplifting as the reason they have ostensibly needed to close stores. They speculate on involvement by Mexican cartels. They write headlines about elected Republican officials’ calls to hike punitive measures against shoplifters.
HuffPost reached out to Media Matters, a nonprofit watchdog group that specializes in analyzing right-wing media. After looking through a video database of Fox programming over the last five years, Media Matters found a very small number of retail theft mentions between 2019 and 2020 — just 35. Since 2021, however, there has been a huge spike — at least 1,575 mentions of retail theft. The coverage was particularly widespread in the fourth quarter of 2021, the group noted.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-shoplifting-epidemic-touted-by-fox-news-is-likely-overblown-data-shows_n_656794a5e4b07b937ff36408 