Well, a quick Google search brings this up from Wikipedia:
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.
Most surveys are propaganda: a sample size of just a thousand people allows to get any result in any area. I could get 85% respondents to support ktulhu as the official deity by handpicking the right respondents. Even if I really wanted to know how much support ktulhu really has, I'd be very troubled because accountants in Idaho are going to view ktulhu differently than mechanics in Florida. For this reason, when I see "N% support X", I read it as "the media agency wants me to think that X has N% support" and I wonder why. Most of the time the answer isn't terribly complex: it's the party affiliation of the agency.
Assuming it's a properly conducted and accurately reported survey, I would say no, except in the very postmodern sense that everything is "propaganda" of a sort, since what is chosen to report and how to report it is determined by the media, and is at least significantly influenced by those who own and control the media.
There is no rise in crime, but people polled say they believe there is. It's a textbook case of Chomsky's manufactured consent phenomena. It's not a drive-by comment, it's simply concise.
Crime reported to police is fairly constant regardless of crime levels. As crime goes up people just stop reporting minor things that the police now no longer has time to handle, making the number reports not change. This makes the crime maps fairly useless, you'd think that Switzerland and Chicago has similar levels of theft since the amount of crime reports are the same, yet Switzerland is as safe a place can get while Chicago is a notorious crime area.
Therefore hard stats like "homicide rate" or soft stats like "perceived crime" are the only ones that matters.
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media is a 1988 book by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion", by means of the propaganda model of communication.