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Crime coverage is tailor-made for newspapers. It is an excellent example
of the definition of news - something that has just happened that the public
doesn't know about. It is still the exception: Most of us don't rob banks,
so when somebody does, we call that news. Crime coverage is relatively
easy. There are lots of documents in a central location and public employees
to use as sources. And many of the documents are privileged, allowing us
to report on them without fear of lawsuit. The best crime stories have
what every reporter looks for when he or she sits down to write - drama,
conflict, good and evil.
On some level, this is information our readers want. In a 1987 article
in Media, Culture and Society, Jack Katz of UCLA suggested that reading
crime news is a "ritual moral exercise." In other words, readers know the
material will depress them and frighten them, but not reading it will in
some way be more distressing. According to Katz, we read crime because
it allows us to work through our own moral issues. It allows us to experience
emotions vicariously and to feel superior without requiring us to actually
do anything.1
Newspapers have institutionalized crime coverage. Virtually every newspaper
has a police reporter. Some have several. The job of those reporters is
to contact police when something "newsworthy" happens and get all the details.
But the very efficiency of that approach to covering crime has led to
some unforeseen byproducts.
The first is the proportion of crime news to other news. Because we
have at least one reporter assigned full time to covering the police, and
often others assigned full time to covering criminal courts, we produce
a quantity of coverage that may make the world look unsafe to our readers.
In her 1980 book, Crime News and the Public, Doris A. Graber noted:
"The mass media supply a large amount of data about specific crimes. These
data convey the impression that criminals threaten a legitimate social
system and its institutions."2
But crime is not increasing. In a 1998 Freedom Forum report titled Indictment:
The News Media and the Criminal Justice System, Wallace Westfeldt and Tom
Wicker wrote: "Crime in America, in fact, is not out of control. Its incidence
remains too high, certainly, and no doubt many crimes are never reported.
But available evidence shows that reported crime rates are declining. The
number of serious crimes reported to the police in 1997 fell for a sixth
consecutive year nationally and dropped too in every region of the nation."3
Nevertheless, the public perception is that we are under assault. All
media, including newspapers, tend to write about violent crime more than
any other kind of crime. The fact is, more than 90 percent of all crimes
are property crimes. But it would be safe to say that most of our crime
coverage in newspapers is violent crime.
As a result, according to Kenneth D. Tunnell, in a 1992 article in Sociological
Spectrum, "Although Americans may see their situation as being threatened
by increasing levels of property and violent crime, in light of actual
victimization rates, such definitions appear to be groundless."4
The costs of crime coverage
The news media's overemphasis on crime news hurts both society and the
news media. The Freedom Forum report pointed out that this disproportionate
and superficial coverage fuels public fear and anxiety, which then can
cause politicians to overreact and pass unnecessary and costly get-tough-on-crime
laws. In February 1999, an American Bar Association study on "Federalization
of Criminal Law" criticized Congress for passing "misguided, unnecessary
and harmful" anti-crime laws, for fear of appearing "soft on crime." State
law, after all, accounts for about 95 percent of all prosecutions. In his
1998 report on the federal judiciary, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist
made a similar point, blaming pressure on Congress "to appear responsive
to every highly publicized societal ill or sensational crime."5
Newspapers pay a price too, some say, with declining circulation. The
problem is the readers. When surveyed, newspaper readers increasingly are
telling us they are sick of the negativity in newspapers. As Geneva Overholser
wrote in a 1998 Washington Post column, "Post readers often rue the prevalence
of crime news in local reporting and its displacement of other newsworthy
activities. They deplore not only the misrepresentation but the feelings
it engenders. Said one reader: 'You don't realize how much all this endless
negativism tears down people's hopes.' Similar sentiments often are cited
by nonreaders as a reason they don't buy the paper."6
Nowhere was that more apparent than in research presented in May 1998
to the International Communication Association. Analyzing the content of
40 newspapers from 1985 to 1995, the researchers charted the amount of
space devoted to certain subject matter, such as crime, community news,
business news, sports, etc., and correlated it with circulation increases
and declines. Their conclusion: "Crime coverage was associated with decreases
in circulation. In short: Community sells, crime does not." The result
was the same for both small and large papers and in all geographic areas.
The authors concluded that papers devoting a proportionately larger part
of their newshole to covering civic and community issues had a growing
base of readers. Papers that relied increasingly on crime coverage had
a diminishing reader base.7
Most of us probably have heard the same thing from our readers: There's
too much bad news in the paper. . . I don't want all the negativity. .
. When are you going to report some good news?
Another unfortunate byproduct of current reporting systems is point
of view. Our main sources for these stories are police and court officers.
That is understandable when we have reporters whose jobs involve keeping
in contact with them. Rarely do we get the side of the accused - even when
attorneys permit interviews. And victims frequently want to remain in the
background.
The result is often the exact opposite of our stated goal: an unbiased,
dispassionate recitation of the facts. In the journal Crime and Delinquency,
Steven M. Gorelick wrote that objectivity for journalists is actually "a
series of practices that journalists use to defend themselves against mistakes
and criticism." Harsh words. But his point is that, in using police reporters
to write lots of stories based on records and interviews with arresting
officers, we are presenting one point of view - the law enforcement side.
In his view, such a law-enforcement bias portrays crime as "the personal
actions of individuals and omit(s) information about the social and historical
context of a criminal act."8 That
is understandable considering that law enforcement is engaged in hunting
down and arresting the individuals. But as journalists, shouldn't we also
be looking at the big picture?
Context is the issue. Part of the problem is caused by how we journalists
see ourselves. We think of ourselves as impartial chroniclers of events,
not agents for change. In Graber's words, "Curable deficiencies in the
existing criminal justice system and personality defects in individuals
are depicted by the media as the main causes of rampant crime. Social causes
play a subordinate, though by no means nonexistent, role. Suggested remedies
are sparse and do not generally include social reforms."9
It is certainly more difficult for us, and possibly also for the police,
to view crime as the result of a flawed society. If that is the case, the
difficulties appear insurmountable. That may not work well in the "news
you can use" era.
Chief Judge Judith Kaye of the New York state Court of Appeals wrote
in the December 1996 issue of the New York Bar Journal that journalists
often make the courts a scapegoat for "complicated and deep-rooted problem
of crime in our society." Her remarks were reported in the Freedom Forum
book, which went on to say, "In her view, and that of many thoughtful persons,
too much of the press pictures crime as primarily a concern of police and
courts
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