Ratcheting up the mayhem

Some Bay Area newsrooms are heaping on coverage of crime incidents. Others are proposing alternatives.

By Michael Stoll
Posted November 10, 2003
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Bay Area television news directors claim a higher standard for their broadcasts than "if it bleeds, it leads."

But the reporting of isolated incidents of crime by Bay Area television stations has grown by 44% from just three years ago, a Grade the News survey of print and broadcast journalism shows.

In the first half of 2003, more than one of every six minutes on these local newscasts described a particular crime. That's more than the time the stations devoted to stories about economics, education, medicine and the environment combined.

The analysis, which focused on the most watched newscast segments, excluded any stories about terrorism.

Except for a recent spike in the number of murders, television's picture doesn't reflect reality. Overall violent crime -- the majority of the crimes reported on television -- is actually down and has been falling for years.

The increased reliance on episodes of crime to inexpensively fill newscasts may inflate the bottom line for stations, but experts warn it also could have dire consequences for public policy, and perhaps weaken communities by making people more mistrustful. (See related story.)

The Grade the News analysis focused only on these problematic episodic reports of crime -- stories centered on a particular tragic event. It excluded stories treating crime as an issue -- looking at trends, causes, effects or solutions (marked below in blue). Rather than simply scaring viewers, these thematic stories help local residents make sense of and act upon their problems.

In the Grade the News sample three newsrooms, two television stations and one newspaper, increased their episodic coverage of crime substantially. An additional station, KNTV Channel 11 in San Jose, studied in full starting in the first half of 2003, reported the most episodic crime of all, about 22% of the measured airtime.

The other four newsrooms, two each in television and print, either stayed about the same or decreased. These differences reflect strongly diverging newsroom philosophies about covering crime events that, while interesting, affect few people directly and make everyone feel less secure.

It's 'The Laci Peterson Show'

From mid-January to mid-July 2003, Grade the News analyzed more than 2,000 stories from eight news local organizations, assigning them grades that ranged from A to D+, based on how they measured up to generally accepted standards of quality and informativeness. It was nearly identical to a study conducted throughout 2000.

The study paid close attention to topics. In the first half of this year, the news was dominated by several big stories: the war in Iraq, the bankruptcy of California and rumblings about recalling a governor. After the war ended, the news became dominated by one specific crime -- what happened to a central valley woman named Laci Peterson.

If Peterson needs no introduction, there's a good reason. The pregnant Modesto homemaker who went missing and turned up dead in San Francisco Bay played high in many news media, with hardly a pause for months. Almost a year later, in November, even the stations that pledged to go on low-crime diets were doggedly covering the minutiae at the preliminary hearing of husband Scott on murder charges. (See related story.)

When news anchors and reporters weren't speculating about whodunit to Ms. Peterson, they were mulling the fate of Brian DeVries, an irresistibly sinister character who had molested 50 boys, been jailed and was eventually released after serving his time. The news helped to stoke the fears of parents that the man's release was the most important thing happening that day, with a strong implication that he would prey again, even though he had himself castrated in prison.

Then there was the kidnapping and dramatic release of a 9-year-old girl in San Jose. And the arrest of a former Los Gatos resident accused, based on fresh evidence, of killing his high-school friend in 1982. The list goes on. Who decides whether any of these stories are news? Often, journalists cover crime because it's easy and cheap to do, and because it never occurred to them to change.

Crime rules the airwaves more than newspapers

Overall, episodic crime comprised 17.1% of the most watched airtime on channels 2, 4, 5 and 7 in 2003, compared with 11.9% in 2000. Were KNTV Channel 11 included, about one in five minutes would have described isolated crimes. In 2003 no other news topic came close.

Because the study randomly sampled newscasts, the luck of the draw has to be taken into account. But the change is far larger than the margins of sampling error, plus or minus 2.5 percentage points for the 2003 survey; 2.3 for the 2000 sample.

The Bay Area's three largest newspapers, taken together, devoted 9.4% of newspaper column-inches to crime incidents, up from 8.9% three years ago. These differences are too small to be sure they were not the result of chance -- that the sample happened to fall on days with more violence in one year than in the other.

What are the real threats?

Some journalists say the higher television crime coverage is a reaction to a troubling increase in the rare, though grave, crime of murder, particularly in Oakland.

Yet across the Bay Area, violent crime is going down. California's "index" violent crimes, homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, fell by 8% between 2000 and 2002 across the nine-county Bay Area. For the first half of 2003, those crimes declined by 3% from the same period in 2000, in the largest jurisdictions where statistics were available.

However, murders -- statistically a small slice of all violent crime -- were up by 45%. That's a difference of 48 cases in a region of 7 million.

Why would the media choose to focus on the most unrepresentative crimes and ignore the larger story that most people are actually becoming safer? Even some of the most crime-focused newsrooms are talking about what messages they are sending the public.

"The discussion we have daily is how we can minimize our crime coverage," said Ed Chapuis, news director at KTVU Channel 2 in Oakland.

KTVU has had a national reputation for producing one of the best evening newscasts in the country. In November 2000, the Project for Excellence in Journalism released a report praising KTVU as the very best, specifically mentioning its low level of crime reporting.

"KTVU doesn't have a helicopter or satellite news-gathering truck," the report said. It quoted the former news director, Andrew Finlayson, as saying, "We couldn't cover a car chase even if we wanted to."

But the station, affiliated with Fox News, experienced a big increase in episodic crime reporting between the 2000 and 2003 Grade the News surveys, rising to 20% of airtime from 12.5% three years ago. Because the sample of stories for each station is a portion of overall TV sample, the margins of error are larger. The difference between 2003 and the survey three years earlier suggests a change at Channel 2, but chance cannot be ruled out.

Mr. Chapuis said he is aiming for stories based on specific events that can have a larger impact, such as the Riders trial or the issue of so-called sideshows, featuring dangerous automotive tricks, in poor neighborhoods of Oakland.

"Those tie into budget issues," he said. "Oakland is millions in the red and has to hire extra cops on the weekend. It's not just a crime story, it's a civic story about budgets."

Yet the amount of airtime devoted to what Grade the News scored as thematic stories, those addressing more than one crime or patterns of crime, dropped at KTVU to 4.6% from 9.3% three years ago. Again, chance may explain some or all of the difference.

Newsrooms spread thin

Part of the reason for the change could be the introduction of an additional half-hour newscast at 6 p.m. three years ago, which was not included in the original study. KTVU's flagship 10 p.m. program is often graced with substantial stories by enterprise reporters Brian Banmiller, Tom Vacar and Randy Shandobil, Mr. Chapuis said. The 6 o'clock show is "stylistically different."

"Six is faster-paced," he said. "Stories are shorter. Focus is more local. It's focused on the today, here and now."

KRON Channel 4, an independent station that lost its NBC affiliation when the network bought KNTV, has also increased its proportion of airtime devoted to crime incidents, 21.5%, up from 11.1% three years ago. The difference is so large here, sampling error can be ruled out.

Stacy Owen, KRON's news director, gave an explanation similar to Mr. Chapuis': expanded airtime. KRON recently added an hour of news at 9 p.m. to its regular evening lineup of an hour at 6 and a half-hour at 11.

"We do eight hours of news a day," Ms. Owen said. "We're spread out all over the Bay Area. We do a lot of stories on education, a lot of stories on economics, and we do a lot of stories on crime."

KRON did, however, have enough resources to send two news vans, both fitted with expensive microwave towers, out of the Bay Area to Modesto to cover the Peterson preliminary hearing.

A higher threshold for crime

KGO Channel 7, the ABC station in San Francisco, takes a different approach. It was the only television station whose episodic crime coverage was measured as decreasing in the GTN survey, to 12.6% from 13.7% three years ago.

Kevin Keeshan, who has been KGO's news director for two years, said he was influenced by the late Carole Kneeland, who as news director of KVUE in Austin Texas, undertook a famous (though fleeting) experiment in 1996, applying heightened criteria to every story about crime:

• Does action need to be taken?

• Is there an immediate threat to safety?

• Is there a threat to children?

• Does the crime have significant community impact?

• Does the story lend itself to a crime-prevention effort?

Mr. Keeshan can cite these principles verbatim. Although, as KGO's Peterson coverage shows, they are not universally applied.

On Oct. 31, KGO started airing a new project addressing the murders in Oakland thematically, called "ABC7 Solutions." The piece by reporter Willie Monroe spotlighted a youth program that uses martial arts, theater and dance to teach non-violence.

A change of heart at KPIX

In the last year, reporters and editors at KPIX, the CBS station in San Francisco, decided they had seen too many stabbings, shootings and hit-and-runs. They started to reassign reporters when the station got overloaded with screen violence.

The decision to go this route happened slowly over time, said Lori Waldon, the new managing editor at KPIX. "It started with a thoughtful conversation that snowballed." So far, upper management is on board.

In Grade the News' studies, episodic coverage of crime on KPIX did increase, but only slightly, to 12% from 10.4% three years ago, modest compared with the surging crime coverage on some other stations. The difference was not statistically significant.

"Crimes happen in every single city in the Bay Area every day," Ms. Waldon said. "You could cover them forever.

"Is that what people really want to hear about? Man X stabbed. Woman Y hurt. How important is that? Now, if all of them are happening in one place, that’s something to take a look at."

At KNTV, Jim Sanders, vice president for news, declined to comment on his station's region-leading crime score, saying that Grade the News' sampling method was unfair. Mr. Sanders echoed a concern of several news directors that the sample only included the more popular first half-hour of the broadcast. The second half of some broadcasts have more in-depth reporting, they said. (Grade the News will adjust its sampling technique for the second half of 2003 to record full-hour shows.)

The Chronicle's ambition

Editors at the San Francisco Chronicle, faced with less room in the paper for news in the sour economy, decided that typical violent crimes were the stories most easily displaced from the front page and local front. In their place, reporters have followed with major investigations looking at the murder rate in Oakland and several alleged cover-ups within the San Francisco Police Department.

"We've made a real decision here in our crime coverage," said Ken Connor, the Chronicle's recently appointed metro editor. "In the newsroom there's cheap crime and there's good crime. Good crime is what's important to our readership in the nine-county Bay Area, which would be a crime that has sufficient interest to the greatest number of people or communities. Cheap crime is often confined to a neighborhood."

The Chronicle's episodic crime coverage fell in the GTN survey -- to 7.8% of column-inches on A1 and local section fronts from 10% three years ago. At the same time, thematic crime coverage has proliferated, to 8.5% of the space in stories measured, up from 4.5%. The numbers suggest a trend, but sampling error cannot be ruled out.

Dick Rogers, the Chronicle's public editor, said the paper has become more ambitious since the merger with the staff of the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner three years ago, and has concentrated on covering patterns of crime. Without the big picture, he said, "undue crime coverage gives the impression that criminals lurk around every corner."

The Mercury's pendulum swings

The Contra Costa Times' episodic crime coverage rose very slightly in the study, to 8.9% from 7.8% three years ago, a change too small to be statistically significant. Andrew McGall, the assistant metro editor, refused to comment.

The San Jose Mercury News' episodic crime coverage increased in the survey, to 11.4% from 8.6% three years ago. Although the difference could be due to sampling error, some editors are having second thoughts about how much blood and guts they splash on the front page.

The Mercury's metro editor, Bert Robinson, described his paper's oscillating coverage philosophies. About six years ago, he recalled, it started aggressively de-emphasizing episodic crime. The person who used to be called the "cops reporter" became the "public safety reporter."

The paper achieved its goals in terms of reducing coverage, he said, but it got to the point where if a big story broke, the newsroom was no longer prepared. When the Yosemite murders happened, the Mercury got beaten by other papers and television, Mr. Robinson said.

So in the last three or four years, the Mercury has put more crime in the paper.

"The question we've been asking ourselves recently," he said, "is has the pendulum swung too far?"

What do you think?