ELECTION COVERAGE
No, New York Times, Lori Lightfoot Did Not Lose Because of Crime
Dispatches from the Chicago mayoral election
After Lori Lightfoot’s defeat in the Chicago mayoral election, the headlines from the New York Times newsletter, The Morning, declared: “After a crime surge, Chicago voters have ousted their current mayor.”
Then, it led off with this:
A progressive problem
Chicago’s mayor race has joined the growing list of evidence that Americans are unhappy about crime.
No. That’s not what happened, and what’s worse, the New York Times reporter who spit out this nonsense, David Leonhardt, probably knows it. He’s a seasoned and usually good reporter who surely knows that Lori Lightfoot, Chicago’s mayor, lost this election because she’s Lori Lightfoot.
I’ll snidely note here that the Times didn’t offer that commentary when Karen Bass won in Los Angeles after beating a tough-on-crime guy who spent twelve times as much as she did on electioneering.
This kind of false narrative from the news media is one reason why we’re in the pickle we’re in here in America. This is not news reporting, it’s editorializing. The analysis of Lightfoot’s loss should have been saved for its…
