Focusing on random incidents of violence can harm us all

Criminologists and researchers in the field of communication have demonstrated that crime-saturated news reports do more than boost profits for media corporations. They can create a climate of public mistrust that can warp public policies.

Sensational news of "grossly unrepresentative crimes" is cheap to produce, lamented Norval Morris, who teaches at the University of Chicago Law School. In a speech presented to federal criminologists in Washington, D.C., five years ago and published by the National Institute of Justice, Morris said:

"'Crime does not pay,' I am told. The hell it doesn't! It clearly pays the newspaper publishers and the TV giants ... It pays the publishers extraordinarily well -- and increasingly they rely on it to fill the airwaves and newspapers."

Robert Weisberg, a criminal law professor at Stanford, said television journalists are hooked on crime coverage.

"Once television stations get a lot of mileage out of a notorious crime," he said, "they get somewhat frustrated if they don't have a substantive daily update on it and want to milk the audience excitement that the coverage induces. And so they then play up other individual crimes, far out of proportion."

The danger, Mr. Weisberg said, is that politicians of both parties are then obliged to demagogue the crime issue, "reinforcing Americans in their perennial belief that crime is always going up, even when it's going down."

Costing the public money

Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, chairman of the state Assembly's public safety committee, offers a case in point. He is promoting a plan he says will save California a billion dollars a year by allowing the early release of "non-violent, non-serious, non-lifer offenders." But high crime reporting discourages rational discussion of his and other reform proposals, he said.

"The concepts are that much more difficult to explain to my colleagues if they and their constituents are convinced by the media that crime is on the rise," Rep. Leno said. "The obvious response to rising crime is lock 'em up and don't let 'em out."

At the national level, researchers documented a surge in television news reports of crime during the 1990s, despite a drop in crime across the decade. The coverage appeared to have a dramatic political impact. A 1994 Gallup Poll found public concern about crime reached its highest level ever and Congress passed a comprehensive anti-crime bill, the Omnibus Crime Act of 1994.

Exaggerating violence, encouraging fear

Other researchers have argued recently that news of individual crimes, out of proportion to actual levels of crime, may make the public on the whole more fearful.

Just this year, a study found strong statistical evidence "that fear of crime is in part a by-product of exposure to crime-saturated local television news." Researchers Daniel Romer and Kathleen Hall Jamieson at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and Sean Aday at Georgetown University, analyzed national surveys of perceived risk and other attitudes, and compared them with viewing habits.

Writing in the March issue of the Journal of Communication, they found the more people watch television news, "the more often they identify crime as a problem" in their community.

Stigmatizing minorities

Excessive crime reporting also can create a distorted view of racial minorities.

A 1998 Annenberg Public Policy Center study concluded: "Fear of crime may also engender increased suspicion of neighbors and of African Americans and other non-White residents who are featured disproportionately in crime coverage as perpetrators of violence."

A recent experiment by Stanford communication professor Shanto Iyengar shows that subjects asked to recall a neutral description of a crime often assume that they heard the suspect was "non-white."

In general, episodic coverage that ignores measurable statistics or rates of crime does more harm than good, Mr. Iyengar said, because specific details of dramatic crime events dominate abstract concepts.

"That kind of coverage is very anti-social," he said.

Viewers complain

But there is a chance that in the Bay Area a new attitude toward crime coverage may be emerging. Kevin Keeshan, news director of KGO Channel 7 in San Francisco, said viewers have made it clear through field research and community meetings that there is too much crime in the news.

Mr. Keeshan agreed with his viewers: "Showing the body bag du jour without context just does a disservice to everybody."

-- Michael Stoll