The Truth Shouldn't Be Called Biased - American Crime Journal |

Why Factually Challenging Republican Narratives Is Not Partisanship. It Is Journalism.

Something deeply corrosive has happened to American journalism, and it did not happen by accident.

Truth itself is now treated as partisan.

Beginning in January 2020, for more than three and a half years, Lynn Packer and I were denounced by large portions of the American right and far-right as monsters, pedophiles, “pedophile protectors,” and participants in the imaginary “cabal” mythology that has infected modern political culture.

Our offense was straightforward: we reported factually on Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.) and Tim Ballard.

O.U.R., Ballard, and even Glenn Beck sent cease-and-desist letters accusing us of defamation. Yet despite the public outrage and theatrical threats, none ultimately chose to take us to court. One suspects there is a reason for that. Discovery is a stubborn thing. Facts are even worse.

In time, the narrative collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.

Beck himself eventually pivoted toward publicly criticizing Ballard, carefully distancing himself from the man he had once championed, washing his hands of the affair with a kind of modern Pontius Pilate routine. Ballard would later face allegations from multiple women accusing him of sexual misconduct. Former O.U.R. President Jon Lines reportedly stated Ballard had not rescued a single child during operations he publicly claimed credit for, while Ballard’s own sister-in-law, Teyva Ware, emerged as another public critic.

Then, in 2022, at the height of the #MeToo era and amid a culture increasingly incapable of separating skepticism from heresy, Lynn Packer and I reported on several high-profile women who had publicly claimed to be victims of human trafficking: Coco Berthmann, Elizabeth Frazier, and Eliza Bleu, whose legal name is Elizabeth Morthland.

According to Packer, the Coco Berthmann investigation was the hardest story he had ever published in his long and decorated career. For me, it was no easier. I remember sitting for nearly fourteen hours before finally publishing Packer’s video alongside my accompanying article. Not because I doubted the reporting, but because I understood exactly what was coming.

And it came.

Once again we were branded monsters and “pedophile protectors” by elements of the right. But this time portions of the left joined in as well, accusing us of “not believing women,” as though journalism’s highest moral duty is blind affirmation rather than verification.

That is the danger of ideological absolutism. Facts become secondary to emotional allegiance.

Ultimately, Coco Berthmann would be federally prosecuted and convicted for fraud related to fabricated claims that she had cancer. Elizabeth Frazier largely disappeared from public scrutiny without meaningfully addressing the reporting surrounding her claims. Eliza Bleu, after briefly serving in an anti-human trafficking role connected to X/Twitter under Elon Musk, eventually became embroiled in controversy of her own.

At one point, during an interview with Tim Pool crony Shane Cashman, she effectively suggested that even if aspects of her story had been fabricated, the fabrication itself had at least “brought awareness” to human trafficking.

But awareness built upon falsehood is not advocacy. It is propaganda wearing the mask of virtue.

And journalism, if it is to mean anything at all, must remain willing to confront lies even when those lies are emotionally satisfying, politically useful, or wrapped in the language of moral righteousness.

And then, almost overnight, the same people who had demonized us began citing our reporting as authoritative.

The accusations faded. The smears became inconvenient. The people who had called us monsters, pedophile protectors, “cabal” operatives, and worse suddenly found themselves using our investigations as source material in their own crusades against fraudsters and grifters within the anti-trafficking industry.

We received very few apologies.

Those who had attempted to destroy our reputations, dox us, or even allegedly weaponize law enforcement through SWATing campaigns rarely bothered with self-reflection. Instead, they quietly repositioned themselves as though they had stood beside us all along. Even Glenn Beck eventually began publicly discussing issues we had been reporting on years earlier while we were being denounced for doing so.

That experience taught us something important: we have been attacked from every direction on the political spectrum precisely because our reporting has never belonged to a tribe.

And that brings us to the present.

Our latest report is not partisan. In fact, if you are conservative, it should concern you deeply.

Because minimizing the realities of violent crime, addiction, and economic collapse in impoverished regions of the South and Midwest does not help those communities. It abandons them.

Entire sections of the country are being hollowed out by opioid addiction, methamphetamine epidemics, collapsing public health, poverty, and systemic despair, while politicians continue recycling crime rhetoric frozen somewhere between 1988 and 1994, as though America itself has remained unchanged since the crack epidemic and the height of New York City violence.

It has not.

The political language has simply outlived the reality.

Many Republican officials and media figures continue invoking images of burning cities and spiraling urban homicide rates long after the statistical conditions underpinning those narratives dramatically changed. Meanwhile, some of the highest murder rates and deepest addiction crises are now concentrated in poorer regions that receive far less national attention because they are politically inconvenient to acknowledge.

You should be angry about that.

Not at journalists documenting it.

At the politicians and media personalities who continue selling you an outdated mythology because fear remains politically profitable.

The truth is not an attack on conservatives. The truth is an indictment of anyone willing to manipulate public perception while real communities collapse quietly outside the television frame.

If a reporter publishes verifiable facts that embarrass Democrats, conservatives call it accountability journalism. If a reporter publishes the same quality of verifiable facts that embarrass Republicans, the identical work becomes left-leaning, biased, or activist reporting. The methodology has not changed. The sourcing has not changed. The standard of evidence has not changed. Only the political direction of the discomfort has changed, and that, apparently, is enough to change everything.

This is not merely dishonest. It is intellectually corrosive in a way that goes beyond ordinary hypocrisy, because it transforms journalism from a discipline rooted in evidence into a tribal loyalty test where facts are judged not by their accuracy but by whose narrative they inconvenience. It trains audiences to evaluate reporting the way a defense attorney evaluates testimony, not by asking whether it is true, but by asking whether it helps or hurts.

The truth, however stubbornly, remains politically unaffiliated.

A recent article published by American Crime Journal titled “The Blue State Crime Myth” demonstrated the problem with uncomfortable clarity. The piece presented a series of factually supported claims drawn from FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data, CDC mortality statistics, and publicly available crime analyses. Red states have experienced higher murder rates than blue states for more than two decades. Many Republican-governed states consistently rank among the nation’s most violent. Major American cities routinely portrayed as dystopian crime zones are dramatically safer today than they were during the peak violence eras of the 1980s and 1990s. National violent crime rates remain near historic lows.

None of these claims are invented. None are speculative. None require ideological interpretation to exist. They are the data. Yet because the conclusions undermine a Republican political narrative, the publication itself has been labeled left-center by media bias rating organizations.

The question worth asking is why.

The answer, once you examine it honestly, is that in modern America, factual criticism of Republican narratives is increasingly treated as evidence of liberalism. Not proof of liberalism. Not indication of liberalism. Treated as evidence, the way a fingerprint is treated as evidence, as though the mere act of publishing inconvenient statistics reveals a hidden ideological hand.

That is not neutrality. That is political conditioning wearing the costume of objectivity.

The absurdity compounds when you examine how crime is actually discussed in American political life. Republican officials across the country have aggressively weaponized crime imagery for electoral purposes while simultaneously governing many of the states with the highest homicide and violent crime rates in the nation. They have moved to preempt Democratic-led cities, override local authority, deploy state resources into urban areas without municipal consent, and construct a sustained media narrative portraying blue cities as uniquely lawless spaces collapsing beneath liberal governance.

The data declines to cooperate.

Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Missouri routinely rank near the top in homicide and violent crime rates. New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey routinely rank among the safest states in the country. New York City recorded 2,245 homicides in 1990. In 2024, that number was approximately 377, a decline of more than 80 percent from its historic peak. Los Angeles peaked at more than 1,000 murders in 1992. In 2024, the city recorded roughly 284. Violent crime nationally has declined dramatically from its early-1990s peak and sits near the lowest levels recorded since 1969.

These are not progressive talking points. They are historical realities drawn from government records. And yet anyone who states them plainly risks being accused of bias, which tells you something important about the current state of the accusation.

What many media bias organizations are actually measuring is not ideological slant. It is narrative disruption. If an outlet challenges Republican mythology, it gets categorized as left. If it challenges Democratic mythology, it gets categorized as right. The possibility that a publication may simply be following the evidence wherever it leads has become nearly incomprehensible to a political culture that treats journalism as team sport rather than civic obligation. The referee who calls fouls on both teams is not neutral. The referee who only calls fouls on one team, and is praised for it by that team’s fans, is not neutral either. Neutrality is not defined by the comfort of the audience. It is defined by the consistency of the standard.

This dynamic creates a dangerous incentive structure for journalism itself. Reporters are subtly encouraged not merely to be accurate, but to maintain an artificial symmetry between truth and falsehood so that no political tribe feels disproportionately criticized by reality. The result is a kind of enforced mediocrity, where the obligation to avoid appearing partisan gradually outweighs the obligation to be correct. Both sides journalism, as it is sometimes charitably called, is not objectivity. It is the abdication of judgment dressed in the language of fairness.

But reality is not required to distribute embarrassment evenly. Sometimes the facts implicate Democrats. Sometimes they implicate Republicans. And sometimes one political movement constructs an entire electoral strategy around a narrative that collapses under statistical examination. Reporting that collapse is not bias. It is the job. The reporter who declines to report it because it might look partisan has already chosen a side. They have chosen the side of the narrative over the side of the evidence.

Hitchens observed that the essence of the independent mind lies not in loyalty to tribe, nation, religion, or party, but in loyalty to evidence and argument wherever they may lead. Modern American political culture increasingly demands precisely the opposite. Loyalty first. Evidence second. And if the evidence conflicts with the loyalty, the evidence is the problem.

American Crime Journal’s reporting on crime statistics is not left-leaning because it cites FBI data showing higher murder rates in Republican-governed states. It is not biased because it demonstrates that conservative narratives surrounding urban crime collapse under scrutiny. It is reporting facts that happen to be politically inconvenient. And inconvenient facts are still facts, regardless of which party finds them inconvenient, regardless of how many media bias organizations mistake discomfort for ideology, and regardless of how many audiences have been trained to ask whose side this helps rather than whether it is true.

The truth does not require ideological permission to exist.

Journalism does not require partisan approval to report it.

And a free press that cannot report uncomfortable facts without being accused of taking sides has already lost something it will not easily recover.