Journal of the Institute Of Justice & International Studies

Number 2, 2003 ISSN 1538-7909 http://www.cmsu.edu/cjinst

Papers from the November 2002 Crime, Media, & Public Policy Symposium
Copyright 2003, Institute of Justice & International Studies Department of Criminal Justice Central Missouri State University Warrensburg, MO 64093 USA Printing Services Central Missouri State University Warrensburg, Missouri

For information about this journal, write or call: Director Institute Of Justice & International Studies Department Of Criminal Justice Humphreys Building Room 300 Central Missouri State University Warrensburg, MO 64093 USA 660-543-4950 Copyright 2003 by The Institute Of Justice & International Studies, Department Of Criminal Justice Central Missouri State University All rights reserved. No part of this journal may be reproduced, stored in a retrieved system or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the Institute Of Justice & International Studies. Printed by: Printing Services, Central Missouri State University

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Contents
Preface iv Introduction ....iv About The Authors..vi Indictment & Trial Of Medias Crime Coverage Ted Gest....................1 Crime On Television --- Issues In Criminal Justice Sarah Eschholz.9 Reporting On The Missouri Department Of Corrections To The Media Tim Kniest..19 Tabloid Tales: Other News, Other Voices Brett Mills...23 Nobody Loves A Crime Reporter David J. Krajicek....33 The Media, The Public, And Criminal Justice Policy Ray Surette.. . 39 Reporting Crime And Violence From A Public Health Perspective Esther Thorson, Lori Dorfman, & Jane Stevens.... 53

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PREFACE
According to Off Balance: Youth, Race and Crime in the News by Lori Dorfman and Vincent Schiraldi, 76% of people get their understanding of crime from the news media while only 22% get their understanding from their own personal experience. Moreover, 80% of respondents to a Los Angeles Times Poll admit that violent crime media coverage increased their fear of crime and personal victimization. This information alone begs the question, is the media accurate in their presentation of crime, and thus, do people really know the truth about crime if they learn about it mostly from the media? In addition, it would be logical to also ponder if the effect that the media has on the public perception of crime has an effect on legislatures with regards to the creation of criminal justice policy. Some would suggest that the media drives policy by the fact that legislatures are fulfilling the will of the people and public perception based on inaccurate information can create bad policy (Murray, 2001). Though the report by Dorfman and Schiraldi concentrated on youth crime in the news media, the major findings of the report raise significant concerns for all criminal justice arenas. For example, according to this research, the news media report youth crime, especially violent youth crime, way out of proportion to its actual occurrence. Youth crime dominates the news, with the most unusual or violent stories the most likely to be covered. Overall, the study suggests, coverage of crime has increased over the last several years, while crime rates, including juvenile crime rates, have actually fallen. In addition, this research suggests that the news media, in particular the television news, focuses on race, especially in stories concerning violent crime. It is interesting to note, that despite the fact that the juvenile violent crime rate began to fall in the early to mid 1990s, state after state continued to implement or use tough laws on juvenile offenders that in particular addressed transfer or waiver. These laws began to change the juvenile justice system and its original philosophies with unprecedented magnitude. Were these changes successful in fulfilling their goals? I guess it would depend on ones definition of success. Was this unprecedented remodeling of the juvenile justice system the result of a public misperception about the trends and patterns of juvenile crime? These are tough questions to answer. However, I would suspect that the same questions could be posed regarding adult crime and the news media, public perception and changing policy.

INTRODUCTION TO THIS ISSUE

In the fall of 2002, Central Missouri State University tackled the very tough question regarding the effects of crime coverage by the media, subsequent public perception of crime and ensuing public policy in a symposium conducted on its campus. Overseen by the Institute of Justice and International Studies, the Criminal Justice Department, Communication Department and Geography & Political Science Department, the two day symposium brought together experts from many disciplines to examine this multifaceted topic. This journal is a collection of several of the presenters papers and presentations. In the first article, Ted Gest, presents Indictment & Trial of the Medias Crime Coverage. This work oversees several aforementioned issues of media coverage of iv

crime and charges the media with four crimes: violating the privacy of victims and defendants, encouraging people to commit new crimes, promoting overreaction by policy makers and painting a misleading picture of crime in American. The article discusses the charges and determines guilt or innocence of each charge. In Crime on Television Issues in Criminal Justice, Sarah Eschholz presents an overview of empirical research designed to determine whether crime presentation by the television news media is accurate, how it impacts people and whether it ultimately impact public policy. Tim Kneists article Reporting on the Missouri Department of Corrections to the Media presents a view from inside a criminal justice agency and examines the role and challenges of a public relations liaison. Tabloid Tales: Other News, Other Voices by Bret Mills brings an international voice to the journal. This article defines and discusses the use of tabloid news particularly in the British media. Nobody Loves A Crime Reporter is presented by David Krajicek. In this work, he discusses the role of the crime reporter, specifically addressing what it is, why it exists, and why it is so challenging. Media, The Public and Criminal Justice Policy, by Ray Surette brings the discussion back around full circle to the question of media coverage of crime and its effect on public policy. The final article of the journal Reporting Crime and Violence from a Public Health Perspective by Esther Thorson, Lori Dorfman and Jane Stevens, critiques current methods of reporting violence and crime and discusses how positive changes could be made with the use of the public health model of news reporting. Within these articles is a wealth of information regarding crime and media coverage, public perception of crime as a result of media coverage and discussion of the links to public perception and legislative response in the form of public policy. Good reading. Fran Reddington, Coordinator Crime, Media, & Public Policy Symposium
References Dorfman, Lori and Schiraldi, Vincent (2001). Off balance: Youth, race & crime in the news. Executive Summary. Building Blocks for Youth. Murray, Albert (2001). Public perception versus good public policy. Corrections Today. 63:7, p. 8 35.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

LORI DORFMAN, DrPH, directs the Berkeley Media Studies Group, a project of the Public Health Institute. The Berkeley Media Studies Group examines news coverage of public health issues and provides media advocacy training and strategic consultation for community groups and public health professionals working on issues from children1s health to violence prevention. Dr. Dorfman is part of an interdisciplinary team working with journalists developing a public health approach to violence reporting. She researches how public health issues are portrayed in the news, teaches a course on mass communication and public health at the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley and is co-author of Public Health and Media Advocacy, Power for Prevention, (Sage Publications, 1993) and News for a Change: An Advocates Guide To Working With The Media (Sage Publications, 1999). SARAH ESCHHOLZ is an Assistant Professor at Georgia State University. She received her Ph.D. in Criminology and Criminal Justice from Florida State University in 1998. Her research includes work in the following areas: media studies, fear of crime, rape, and gender and race issues. Her many publications on the media include: The Racial Typification of Crime and the Criminal Typification of Race: The Social Construction of Social Threat by Local TV News in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, Race and Attitudes Toward the Police: Assessing the Effects of Watching Reality Police Programs in the Journal of Criminal Justice. TED GEST was a writer and editor at U.S. News & World Report, a weekly newsmagazine based in Washington, D.C., from 1977 to 2000. After covering the Carter White House, he was the magazine's chief legal affairs writer for 15 years, covering the Justice Department, the Supreme Court, and crime and justice issues nationally. After 1996, he served as national news editor and as a writer on law schools and other education issues. In 1998, he became president of Criminal Justice Journalists, a national organization of reporters, writers, and broadcasters who cover criminal justice. "Crime and Politics," Gest's book on anticrime policy in the United States since the late 1960s is scheduled to be published in the spring of 2001 by Oxford University

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Press. Before joining U.S. News, Gest was a reporter and editor at the St. Louis PostDispatch. He is a graduate of Oberlin College and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. As a Senior Fellow Mr. Gest presently directs the Program on Crime and the News Media with The Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, the University of Pennsylvania.

TIM KNIEST has served since 1994 as the Chief Public Information Officer for the Missouri Department of Corrections. His duties include providing information and assistance to the public and the media, and overseeing Department public education projects. Mr. Kniest began his career in corrections in 1974 as a probation and parole office for the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole in St. Louis. He later served as a supervisor in Chillicothe and St. Louis, including two years as the Director of Community Services in the St. Louis region. Mr. Kniest graduated from the University of Missouri at St. Louis with a BS in Education. He has conducted media and public relations training sessions for the National Institute of Corrections, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the American Correctional Association, and the Missouri Correctional Association. DAVID KRAJICEK worked as a crime reporter in Omaha, Nebraska, and Iowa before becoming chief of the police bureau for the New York Daily News. He left the paper to teach journalism at Columbia University and in recent years returned to writing full time. He writes The Justice Story column for the Daily News and contributes to many other publications, including the Village Voice and Manchester (UK) Guardian. Mr. Krajicek is the author of Scooped! Media Miss Real Story on Crime While Chasing Sex, Sleaze and Celebrities, published by Columbia University Press. Mr. Krajicek is cofounder and first vice president of Criminal Justice Journalists. He has spoken about crime reporting and the news at the Poynter Institute in Florida and on C-Span, the BBC, and NPRs On the Media. His citations include the John Peter Zenger Award of the New York State Bar Association. He also has been cited by the New York Press Club and the Associated Press.

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JANE ELLEN STEVENS is a freelance multimedia journalist. She began her career as a copy editor at the Boston Globe, moved to the San Francisco Examiner where she was assistant foreign/national editor, Sunday magazine writer, and technology reporter and columnist. She founded a syndicated science and technology feature service with 20 newspaper clients worldwide, including the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, the Washington Post, and Asahi Shimbun's AERA Magazine. For four years, she lived and worked in Kenya and Indonesia. Shes written for magazines, including National Geographic, and worked for New York Times Television as a videojournalist. She has done multimedia reporting for the New York Times, Discovery Channel, and MSNBC.com. She is teaching the first multimedia reporting class offered at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She is director of the Violence Reporting Project, which encourages news organizations to include a scientific and prevention, or public health, approach to crime reporting. BRETT MILLS is a Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Glamorgan in the UK. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Kent at Canterbury and CELTA from International House, London. At Glamorgan he teaches Media, Race and Gender; Consumer Culture; Researching Media Culture; Researching Communication. He has been a visiting lecturer at Central Missouri State University. Brett Mills research interests include: comedy and humour; television sitcom; popular television; and, Australian media. He has published on radio and television comedy and literary studies. RAY SURETTE received his Ph.D. in Criminology from Florida State University. He has been a Professor in the College of Health and Public Affairs at the University of Central Florida since 1995. His primary research interest involves the relationship of the mass media, crime, and criminal justice in America. His published books include Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice: Images and Realities, The Media and Criminal Justice Policy, and Justice and The Media: Issues and Research. In addition, Professor Surette has published a number of research articles in varied academic journals that explore the associations between media and criminal justice policy.

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ESTHER THORSON, Ph.D., Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research at the University of Missouri, has published extensively on consumer response to advertising and other forms of promotion. She has published theoretical work about the impact of emotion generated by ads, on how different advertising appeals impact consumers, and the variables that drive attention to advertising. Thorson has been involved with Berkeley Media Studies Group in developing and evaluating more public health-friendly modes of reporting crime and violence. In collaboration with Charles Atkin of Michigan State University, Thorson has been conducting phone surveys, content analyses, and focus groups that relate to how youth and adults are responding to advertising of liquor on television and in billboards. Thorson is a fellow of the American Academy of Advertising and winner of the 2003 Outstanding Contributions to Advertising Research from that organization.

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INDICTMENT & TRIAL OF MEDIAS CRIME COVERAGE Ted Gest*

rime totals have declined in recent years, but a long-term perspective is helpful to understand the trends. In 1969, when I began as a daily newspaper reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 662,000 violent crimes were reported across the country, about 330 per 100,000 residents. In 2001, according to the FBIs Uniform Crime Reports, there were 1,437,000 violent crimes, more than 500 per 100,000 residents. Despite the welcome news about crime going down in the 1990s, more than twice as many violent incidents were reported 32 years after I started. The crime rate, taking the population into account, also went up dramatically. If crime totals include the unreported incidents, as the Justice Departments victimization survey estimates, the overall total is higher but it has declined since the early 1970s. Whatever the actual figure, there is little doubt that the crime problem in this country has become more serious in the last half century, and that it deserves serious news coverage. In fact, the news media stand accused of covering sensational crimes to the point that public fears are exaggerated. A recent example is the sniper case in the Washington, D.C., area in the fall of 2002. While undeniably fascinating and scary, it dominated the airwaves for three weeks while most less-dramatic cases, including homicides, got little or no attention. The news media and crime are locked in a symbiotic relationship. We cant seem to have one without the other. One threshold question for many of our inquiriesone that has spawned as much heat as light over the yearsis the actual influence of the news media, whether its over individual wrongdoers, government policy making, or fear of crime. Critics argue that the media do exert an influence, and its results usually are bad. In the spirit of criminal-justice reporting, I will outline a four-count indictment against those of us in the media. We will examine each of the charges and decide whether the media are guilty. We violate privacy of victims and defendants alike to titillate our readers and viewers. We encourage people to commit new crimes by publicizing current and past ones. We promote overreactions by policymakers by creating an atmosphere that demands instant, often oversimplistic, reform. We give the public a misleading picture of crime in America.

Copyright 2003 Ted Gest, published here by permission. Correspondence should be addressed to author, 720 Seventh St., N.W., Third Floor, Washington, D.C. 20001.

Before we put the media on trial, lets define terms. I am referring to the news media, an increasingly unruly lot that started with newspapers and magazines, expanded to television and radio, and now includes any number of cable television and online news outlets. The media are not a monolithic force but instead a very fragmented institution that change format and content daily. Thats one of the challenges to responsible criticism of the media: they are a moving target. I do not take responsibility here for the many police, court, and crime drama programs on television, as well as for the videogame industry. One could argue that they are media in the broad sense of the term, but we should separate them in our analysis. Some people do not. They argue, for example, that the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School was encouraged both by videogames and the news media. The first county of my indictment of the media was that they violate peoples privacy to titillate the audience. We do violate privacy, but I maintain that we generally do it in the public interest. Some crime victim advocates contend that victims should be able to opt out of news stories about their cases. Generally, we in the media reject that idea. APBnews.com, an online news service covering crime that operated between 1998 and 2000, used the slogan You have the right to know. We crime reporters say that the public does have the right to know about crimes committed against our fellow citizens, with the possible exception of offenses like incest and child abuse that occur within families and the details of sexual assaults. Some news organizations are re-examining their longstanding practices of shielding rape victims, if they choose to come forward and tell their stories. We dont report on individual crimes to titillate but to inform. To be sure, some stories are told mostly for their shock value, and one can debate how much detail about a case is appropriate to include. My general practice is to include more detail than less. We should be able to find out about what crimes are occurring in our community, in part so that we can take action to protect ourselves. We also should know how our tax supported agencies are responding to crimes. To be sure, most of the news media are profit-making enterprises, so we plan our news coverage in some measure to earn income. In large part, we view it also as a public service. Different media do use varying standards on what is appropriate to report. In general, there is increasing sensitivity to victims, partly as a result of lobbying by victim advocacy groups. We dont always include addresses or personal details that would not help solve the crime or help the public protect itself. Some critics wonder about incidents like the photos of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardts autopsy. Mainstream media organizations did not plan to publish them but rather hoped to obtain them to do better reporting on the safety issues involved. (An Internet entrepreneur may indeed have planned to publish them.) So on count number one, I conclude that some media are guilty of misdemeanors, and occasional felonies, if you count everything that may appear on the Web. Overall, most media are trying to inform their viewers and readers about a significant public problem. Count number two is that we encourage people to commit crimes by publicizing them. This is a trickier one, because motivation can be very difficult to discern. Cases can be found in which criminals say they perpetrated certain acts because of something they saw on television or read in the newspaper. But these are anecdotal, and even if we could compile a fairly long list, I doubt that they would amount to a very large proportion of serious crimes overall. And whats the alternative? If we were to report no crime, or cut down 20 percent on coverage, would crime disappear? Obviously not. 2

I will declare the news media, as distinct from videogames and the entertainment media, not guilty here, but not before saying that this is a serious issue that deserves more discussion and research. It is particularly important during these days of concern over terrorism. After September 11, 2001, government agencies took down web sites that they believed might provide critical information to terrorists, such as vulnerabilities in local utility systems. Open-government advocates asserted that terrorists could obtain such information readily without checking Web sites. Some continue that argument by maintaining that private citizens should know about any vulnerabilities so that they can be corrected. If discharges from a local chemical plant can leak to places near where my children go to school, shouldnt I have the right to know about it? Lets consider the third count in the indictment of the media: that we promote overreaction among politicians. I would convict the media of at worst a misdemeanor here. Yes, we do report a lot about crime, but as Ive said, crime is a major problem in this country, high on the list along with education, health care, the economy, and a few other issues. Making crime a major subject of news reports does not in and of itself dictate poor public policy. Lets take one issue in which the news media might be implicated to some degree: In the late 1980s, serious juvenile crime in America increased sharply. There were reports of more and more teenagers, seemingly without a conscience, robbing, maiming and sometimes killing innocent citizens. Critics seized on the perception that the juvenile justice system was too lenient, allowing many delinquents to be released too quickly after their first few arrests. These critics argued that what was needed was to send more of these so-called superpredators to the adult court system, where supposedly they would be treated more harshly. It sounded logical, but it proved not to be true. Academic research showed that those sent to the adult system often committed new crimes at a higher rate than those who were retained in juvenile court. Why was this? One reason is that juveniles, not surprisingly, tend to enter the adult system when they are somewhat less violent than their older counterparts. They may end up at the lower end of the penalty range. In other words, its no certainty that the juveniles who are sent to the adult system get tougher penalties. Yet the news media typically published politicians assertions that it would be a good idea to require more juveniles to be tried as adults. For several years, Congress debated whether to require states to try more juveniles as adults automatically as a condition to receive federal aid to fight juvenile crime. The law never was enacted, although for several years the federal funding law encouraged programs that promote accountability of offenders. Eventually, some in the media reported on the studies doubting the efficacy of trying large numbers of juveniles as adults. These included U.S. News & World Report and the New York Times. But many references to trying juveniles as adults were uncritical. Some would argue that the news media were complicit in this and other arguably wrong-headed policies. I conclude that the media were culpable of inadequate reporting but that it amounted to a minor offense. The real failure is at the political level. I do not believe that the media must take the rap for not keeping politicians in check. Yes, we try to function as watchdogs, but we ultimately cannot be held responsible for the failures of government to pursue rational policies that are supported by good research. 3

Another fairly recent example often cited is the three strikes and youre out sentencing schemes that were popular in the late 1980s and 1990s. The news media did widely publicize the murders of youngster Polly Klaas in California and others who were victimized by repeat criminals. In 1994, the crucial year when crime rates were at their highest in modern times and legislation proceeded at both the federal and state levels to embody three strikes in the statute books, we dutifully reported endorsements of the idea by Democrat and Republicans alike. Some observers say that in California, the public and politicians received most of their information and commentary on the issue not from news reports but rather talk radio programs that discussed three strikes incessantly and provided large blocks of air time to three strikes proponents. The news media also reported the concerns of opponents, who complained that the state would end up incarcerating people for many years at great public expense for some offenses that were not very serious. Now three strikes is under attack, in the U.S. Supreme Court and elsewhere, for having gone too far. Should we in the media have done a better job of explaining how three strikes would work, particularly in the harsh form that California adopted? Yes. But does our failure to do so make us responsible for enacting the measures? No. True, we are influential because we are the conduit through which the public gets much of its information about criminal justice issues as well as many others. We should do a more responsible job, but to declare us the guilty party responsible for flawed anticrime ideasespecially ones that we did not advocateis unfair. Lets consider the fourth and last count in my indictment of the news media: that we too often fail to give the public a true picture of crime in the United States. Here is where the media have been guilty of several felonies. One way in which we do this is with our seeming obsession with the ups and downs of yearly crime rates, which resembles the way we report on the stock market or aggregate student test scores. In doing this, the media may get the annual numbers right but miss the big picture, which, is that crime in America is a serious problem that has worsened in recent decades. One can debate whether the problem in certain years is more or less serious than the preceding year, depending on whether one relies on the FBIs compilation of reported crimes or the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics victimization estimates that included unreported crimes. The crime issue should not fall off the radar screens of either policymakers or the news media just because crime rates went down in the late 1990s. If the result of that is to reduce government support for worthwhile anticrime programs, we are not doing ourselves much good to prepare for the future, when its almost inevitable that crime will rise again; in fact, it may be happening now. The news medias coverage of crime should be improved. More attention should be paid to the quality rather than merely to the quantity. Critics are prone to cite studies showing that during the 1990s, the national television networks increased the number of minutes devoted to homicides when the actual number of homicides was going down. This critique holds little merit for me. TV networks cover such a tiny proportion of murdersand they include the O.J. Simpson and Chandra Levy casesthat there is no logical relationship between quantity of coverage and the overall number of murders across the nation. News organizations often do move from supposed crisis to crisis in focusing on one crime or type of crime. This is primarily true of the 24-hour cable networks, whose influence on more mainstream print and broadcast media may be growing. The phenomenon didnt start with O.J. Simpsonthere were plenty of sensational crimes before thatbut that is as good a place as any to start in the modern era, given its coincidence with the 1994 crimewave peak.

Since then, there has been one sensational case after anotherJonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy, the kidnappings of several young girls, and the Washington, D.C., sniper case of fall 2002. (Its not all violent crime; in November 2002 it was the Winona Ryder shoplifting trial that got an inordinate amount of TV play.) The saturation reporting of each of these episodes certainly has given rise to the idea that no one is safe and that we all should be fearful. One point in the medias defense is that it does seem that the amount of what crime analysts call stranger to stranger violencecrimes perpetrated by people unknown to the victimshas increased in recent decades. But we are not even close to the point that most of us need to be fearful every time we go outside. I lived through the Washington sniper case, which perhaps came closer to promoting this phenomenon than did any other recent incident. It was unnerving to know that someone was aiming a rifle at innocent citizens all over the metropolitan area. The local media generally did a good job in keeping people up to date on hour-tohour developments. Much of the national media overdid the coverage in a way that may have dissuade outsiders from visiting the Washington area. While certainly a fascinating story, did it deserve being the lead story on national nightly news programs every day for weeks? I doubt it. One night, ABC and others led with news of Baltimore police checking out an exMarine with a rifle who had been involved with a shooting episode with his wife and drove a white van, supposedly the kind of vehicle used in the killings. It turned out that this lead was just one of hundreds or thousands of dead ends, but that didnt stop networks from reporting iteven after local authorities had dismissed it as almost certainly meaningless. Then there was the succession of profilers speculating on characteristics of the sniper. Most of the speculation turned out to be wrong, including that the shooter never was in the military, probably lived in Montgomery County, Md., was a delivery truck driver, etc.. A prominent criminologist defended his speculation, noting that he did end up getting a few things right, such as that two people were involved. Does that mean that we should measure media reporting like baseball averagesthat if we get 3 out of 10 items right, were batting .300, an all-star average? It was appropriate for us to consult experts and to report the thankfully limited history of so-called spree killers, but we should have used this material with a greater deal of caution. Overall, much coverage of the sniper case was justified because it was so unusual and scary. It was a story that had to be reported. Even if there had been 20 percent less coverage, many youngsters still would have been afraid, even if their actual odds of being victimized were minuscule. Just before the sniper case captured public attention, the news media suffered another black eye in a less sensational but also significant case. It started for me on September 9, when I woke up to see in the Washington Post and New York Times an Associated Press story on the latest so-called victimization survey issued by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and based on a survey of Americans to determine how many had been victimized the previous year. I was surprised to see this report, because journalists normally get a heads up on this annual survey so that we can prepare reports during the few days before the release date. I had not heard about this one, and assumed that there had been some miscommunication between the Justice Department and the media It turned out to be worse. When I looked up the entire story online, I realized that the survey had been leaked. The full version was not available on the Justice Department web site, which made it impossible for anyone else to do a story on it because the full data were not available. Even stranger to me was that the only two people quoted in the story were experts I had never heard of, and both said roughly the same thing, that the reported decline in crime in 2001 compared with 2000 was due in large part to the incarceration of more criminals. This didnt make much sense, because I didnt believe that incarceration had increased in that year, certainly not enough to affect the national crime rate. I asked the AP reporter about all this, as did Fox Butterfield of the New York Times. It turned out that the reporter couldnt locate the quoted sources. When his bosses confronted him and then started checking his previous stories, it turned out that unidentifiable sources, mostly from special interest groups or from academia, were found in 40 stories over the past few years. The reporter was fired, and AP recently published one of the longest corrections 5

in history, listing the mysterious sources in all of the stories. Ironically, the identifying slug on one of them, quoting three untraceable people, was CATCHING LIARS. Now this alone would qualify as being one of the worst scandals in modern media history, but thats not the entire story. It turns out that the Associated Press made several errors in the statistical part of the victimization story, errors that have mostly remained uncorrected. These began with the very first words of the story, which said that the number of Americans who were victims of violent crimes except for murder fell by 9 percent in 2001 In truth, it was not the number of Americans that dropped but the number of victimizations, and that went down by 10 percent, not 9. Remember that one person can be victimized several times in a given year. There were several other mistakes, some of them major, like reporting that guns were used in 26 percent of violent crime, when in reality that applied to any weapon; firearms were only 9 percent of the total. And so on. The Associated Press is considered to be the premier news agency for factual reporting of hard news in this country. Its reports are used by thousands newspapers, radio and television stations, and web sites all over, potentially more than 15,000 outlets by one count. Once the AP reported this story exclusively on a Sunday, it was unlikely that many other news organizations would do their own versions, with the primary source material unavailable, and few did. This means that this erroneous story remains in databases all over. (AP did run a short correction on some of the statistical points.) Its easy to blame all of this on one bad apple, and thankfully there are few of them in our ranks. One disturbing question is, as media critic Jack Shafer put it on the web site Slate.com, What does it say about Associated Press methods and practices that nobody caught [reporter Newton] over the course of 32 months? AP has said in March 2003 that it still was studying ways both to shore up its fact-checking procedures and to better train of reporters in coverage of issues involving crime statistics. In late 1997, a group of journalists began a national organization called Criminal Justice Journalists, with the aim of improving media coverage in this area. Its a tall order for a profession that largely has viewed police and crime reporting as an entry-level job that journalists can do with little or no preparation. In 2001, the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania provided support so that I could devote most of my time to the effort. We now have a Ford Foundation grant to begin a comprehensive guide to journalists on covering crime and justice issues, and we run a 500-member online discussion list that is based at Poynter Institute (a journalism think tank in Florida) on which journalists can exchange information and helpful hints on stories and sources. We also run a Web site (www.reporters.net/cjj) and several conferences or seminars each year. We get some support from the National Center on Courts and Media of the National Judicial College in Nevada for programs on better court coverage. We are starting a daily headline service on important crime and justice issues that will help fill those gaps between the saturation coverage stories. This must be a campaign for the long haul. Only a minority of journalists covering these issues belong to the group, and their ranks are changing constantly. It must be understood that no professional organization like this tells journalists what stories they must cover. Rather, we can suggest important trends and sources, but let them fill in the details to their audiences as they see fit. We also represent the interests of journalists who are denied access to crime scenes and court records, among other places. In October 2002, we held panels for journalists at the International Association of Chiefs of Police convention in Minneapolis. Before that meeting, we were required to fill out an application for a media pass that included a background check that asked us if we had ever been arrested, been a suspect, a victim, a witness to a crime, received any citationstraffic, criminal or petty misdemeanor, made a 6

police report in regards to ourselves or someone else, or been questioned by police for any reason at any time. It may be appropriate to do a basic security check, but it is unnecessary to ask a person who covers law enforcement as a profession whether a police officer ever has asked them a question. In summary, the news media are not so bad about reporting on crime and anticrime policies as some of the critics say, but we could stand much improvement. If this were a criminal proceeding, we should plead guilty to several offenses and agree to mend our ways.

CRIME ON TELEVISION --- ISSUES IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE Sarah Eschholz*

elevision broadcasting, whether in the form of the news or crime drama programming, is continuously scrutinized for its potential to influence individual viewers perceptions and in turn impact public policy. Critics often suggest that the media supports the perpetuation of negative attitudes about minorities (Entman 2000; Entman 1992; Edsall and Edsall 1991), and focuses on violent crime disproportionately to property crime and other pressing social problems in society (Cavender and Fishman 1998; Chiricos and Eschholz 2002). While comments about televised media abound both in common discourse and in scholarly publications in fields ranging from sociology to public policy, to communications and criminal justice, empirical explorations of the media, its influence on public perceptions and public policy are somewhat limited. This paper will provide an overview of literature that focuses on the type of coverage crime stories receive, racial stereotypes in crime coverage, whats missing in crime coverage, audience perceptions of crime coverage in the form of fear of crime, attitudes toward the police and punitive attitudes, and conclude with a discussion of the ways these factors may influence public policy. Empirical data from several studies conducted by the author will be used to augment the previous points. These studies include a content analysis of 26 evening television programs in 1995 coupled with a telephone survey of 1490 individuals on their viewing patterns and fear of crime in the Leon County area of Florida, a 1998 content analysis of 3 different news stations evening news combined with a telephone survey of 2526 individuals in the Orlando/Orange county Florida area, a 2000 content analysis of NYPD Blue and Law and Order, and a 2000 telephone survey of 2361 individuals in Georgia concerning fear of crime and community participation. Communications theory on the effects of television programming on viewers perceptions of the world, in particular perceptions of the dangerousness of the world, began in the 1960s with the work of George Gerbner and his associates at the Annenburg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania under a grant from the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (Gerbner and Gross 1976). Gerbner posited the cultivation hypothesis, predicting that television viewing, regardless of the content, would cultivate a mean world view among heavy viewers. In other words, television programming presents a hegemonic view of reality that reproduces status quo power relationships and violence and crime are often used as symbols in this effort (Gitlin 1986; Hall 1997). Alternatively reception research suggests that diverse viewers are variously affected by the different messages that appear on a multitude of types of programming (Dahlgren 1988; Fiske 1986; Jenson 1991). Therefore, the characteristics of both the viewer and the programs watched are important factors in predicting television effects (Eschholz 1997; Heath and Gilbert 1996). Furthermore, individuals with shared background characteristics such as race, sex, and class form interpretive communities whose members interpret media messages similarly (Barak
* Copyright 2003 Sarah Eschholz, published here by permission. Correspondence should be addressed to author, Department of Criminal Justice, P.O. Box 4018, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA 30302-4018, 404-651-3659, 404-651-3658(fax), seschholz@gsu.edu.

1996; Condit 1989; Fiske 1986; Jenson 1991). Research grounded in both cultivation theory and reception research has focused on three major areas: 1) research that explores how justice and the criminal justice system are represented on television, 2) research focusing on how race is portrayed on television, and 3) effects research (focusing primarily on the impact watching television has on fear of crime or other perceptions). Some questions media studies of crime on television have tried to address include the following: What is shown on television content? Is there more crime, and different types of crime, on television than in reality? Are offenders disproportionately shown as minorities? Does watching television influence fear of crime, punitive attitudes, and other public perceptions? Do men and women, Blacks and Whites interpret media messages in a similar manner? Does crime coverage in the media influence public policy? The remainder of this paper will explore findings from empirical research addressing these questions. Violence on Television Several studies have shown that television programming greatly exaggerates the amount of violent crime in the world relative to property crime, and the frequency of criminal events (Gerbner and Gross 1976; Gerbner et al. 1977; Chermak 1995; Potter and Ware 1987). Both news and entertainment media consistently portray a more violent and dangerous view of our world than exists in reality. A 1998 study of local news programming in the Orlando, Florida, examined the content of three weeks of evening news programming on three different channels (Eschholz, Chiricos and Weitzel 1998). The overwhelming majority of all local news broadcasts began with a crime story, and approximately one-quarter of all stories (apart from weather, sports or anchor chitchat) shown on the news were crime related. Of these crime stories more than two-thirds of them focus on violent crime. This is almost exactly opposite UCR measures of crime that report violent crime in Orlando made up 18 percent of all crime in Orlando during the same year the study was conducted (U. S. Department of Justice 1998). News programming does not have a market on the use of crime, particularly violent crime. Crime drama programs and reality police programming also capitalize on the marketability of crime stories (Eschholz, Mallard and Flynn 2002; Surrette 1998; Fishman and Cavender 1998). The genres of news, reality police programs and crime dramas have undergone some cross-pollination with news programming becoming more sensational and entertaining like crime drama programs, and crime drama programs drawing story lines from reality to make them appear more realistic (Cavender and Fishman 1998; Krajicek 1998; Oliver and Armstrong 1998; Bagdikian 1997). This process is exemplified in a recent advertisement for Law and Order: Dont take us the wrong way. Law and Order has excellent writers. But when youre coming up with story lines for a real life crime drama set in New York, you dont have to look far for inspiration. Just open up the newspaper. Theres enough material for a season. Some research even indicates that viewers may interpret dramas and the news in a similar manner (Breslin 1990). Reality programs present either actual footage or dramatic reenactments of the real-life adventures of police officers, criminals, emergency medical personnel, and everyday citizens 10

performing heroic feats (Eschholz, Blackwell, Gertz and Chiricos 2002:328) and crime drama programs are generally fictional portrayals of the criminal justice system focusing primarily on violent offenders, additionally these programs are usually presented from the perspective of either law enforcement officials or prosecutors (Eschholz et al. 2002b:3). A recurrent theme of both reality police programs and crime dramas is justice, brought about by a police officer catching an offender and the offender receiving punishment for his/her crime (Kurtz 1993; Sparks 1995; Surrette 1998). In a study of several reality police programs Mary Beth Oliver (1994) found that, much like the news studies, the image of crime shown on these programs is an inversion of reality. While murder makes up less than 0.2 percent of all crimes in the United States, a full 50 percent of the crimes shown on reality police programs involve a murder. Similarly, property crime makes up 87 percent of all crimes nationally and only 13 percent of crime on reality police programming. Research by Cavender and Bond-Maupin (1993), Kooistra et al. (1998) and Whitney et al. (1997) noted similar trends. Furthermore, on reality police programs over 60 percent of the crimes are cleared by arrest compared to only 18 percent in reality (Oliver 1994). More qualitative work on reality police programs suggests several themes underlie these programs. First, these programs generally present a pro-law enforcement message, which emphasizes the enforcement functions of police work (Cavender and Fishman 1998; Surette 1998). Crime is often shown as being both random and the result of individual pathology rather than larger social ills such as poverty, racism and unemployment (Cavender 1998; Cavender and Bond-Maupin 1993; Cavender and Fishman 1998; Doyle 1998). Additionally, the crime problem is often depicted along racial lines, with a disproportionate number of white officers compared to white offenders, and a disproportionate number of minority offenders compared to minority officers (Kooistra et al. 1998; Kunkel et al. 1996; Oliver 1994). Similar themes, including a pro-Criminal Justice system message, efficient police departments, and the use of control-talk, which emphasizes an us against them mentality, can all be found in crime dramas (Sparks 1995; Cavender and Fishman 1998). A 2002 (Eschholz et al. 2002b), study of NYPD Blue and Law and Order (two of the most popular and longest lasting crime dramas on primetime television) found that over 80 percent of all crimes presented on these dramas were murders, and the ratio of clearance rates between TV and reality (UCR clearance rate for violent crimes) were 1.26 (Law and Order) and 1.61 (NYPD Blue). Additionally, both of these programs averaged over one civil rights violation per episode, and control talk was often used by police officers and prosecutors to justify these violations. While television news, reality police programs and crime dramas all present information about crime to viewers in a unique manner, much of the content of these programs is similar. All three program genres greatly over-represent violent crime as a percentage of all crime in the world. The efficiency of the police in terms of their ability to solve cases is also overrepresented on broadcast television. These distorted images may combine to skew viewers perceptions of the crime problem in the United States. These distortions become particularly problematic when they serve to stereotype negatively minorities. Racialized Crime Images in Television Programming 11

Two recent articles have reviewed the literature on the racialized portrayals of offenders and other roles such as police officers, and victims, with an eye toward identifying whether more offenders on television are minorities than whites (racial typification of crime), and whether within racial categories minorities are disproportionately shown as offenders compared to other more positive roles (criminal typification of race) (Chiricos and Eschholz 2002; Eschholz 2003). The majority of studies found that Whites are more frequently shown as offenders than their African American and Hispanic counterparts in the local news (Chiricos and Eschholz 2002; Romer, Jamieson and DeCoteau 1998; Klite, Ardwell and Salzman 1997; Gilliam et al. 1996; Chermak 1995; Entman 1992; Sheley and Ashkins, 1981) and in a variety of other types of programming such as Crime Dramas, Reality Police Programs, and News Magazines (Eschholz, 2003). This finding was surprising, given public opinion data from Tallahassee, Florida, which suggest that viewers think they see more African American offenders on the local news than white offenders (Eschholz, 1998). One reason for this may be that, several of the studies that examined only violent crime on local news programs found that African Americans were more likely to be shown as offenders than their white counterparts (Dixon and Linz 2000; Romer et al. 1998; Klite et al. 1997; Gilliam et al. 1996). Media perpetuation of racial stereotypes of the typical offender may not just be a function of one race being shown as offenders more frequently than another. An alternative possibility is that viewers process information about a specific race by looking at the portrayals within a racial category. Sullivan (quoted in Drummond 1990:28) demonstrated this point in describing how Blacks are treated in the media: As he [the Black male] typically appears in the media, hes either a jewelry-bedecked drug pusher, a misogynous pimp or a vicious thug. Every study of local news reviewed in the literature found that Blacks had a higher ratio of offenders to other roles, whether these roles are police officers, victims, officials or reporters, than their White counterparts (Chiricos and Eschholz 2002). Results for reality police programming (Oliver 1994), national news, and crime drama (Eschholz 2003) showed a similar pattern. Several generalizations about the content of television broadcast programming can be made from past studies. First, local news, crime drama, and reality police programming all greatly exaggerate the crime problem in the United States, particularly the violent crime problem. Second, the Criminal Justice system generally and law enforcement officers specifically are typically shown in a flattering light on the local news, crime dramas, and reality police programming. Television crime clearance rates greatly exceed real life numbers. Third, although the actual number of minority offenders is less than white offenders on television broadcasts, the percentage of minorities that are shown as offenders compared to other roles is much higher than comparisons with White characters, which leads to the criminal typification of race. Based on both cultivation theory and reception research it is not enough to know the content of television programming, it is also important to examine the consequences of viewing this content. Does Watching Television Impact Public Perceptions? Does watching television impact public perceptions? The obvious answer would appear to be yes. Otherwise, why would some many companies invest enormous amounts of money 12

into television advertising (Croteau and Hoynes 2001)? Additionally, examples of periods of moral panics such as the crack-cocaine epidemic in the 1980s (Chiricos 1995; Reinerman and Levine 1989) and the panic over juvenile violence in the early 1990s (Chiricos 1995) show widespread public and political reactions to stories reported in the media. Television and newspaper stories about violent crime and juvenile violence increased more than 400 percent between June and November of 1993. In the wake of this extraordinary burst of media coverage, public concern about crime rose dramatically. Americans ranking crime and violence as the nations foremost problem jumped from 9 percent to 49 percent between January 1993 and January 1994 (Gallup 1994:6). Politicians at every level rose to the challenge of keeping up with public opinion. Proposals to stem the seeming epidemic of violence included everything from castration to caning, from fingerprinting school children to incorporating military technology in the latest war on crime. That levels of violent crime actually were declining was apparently irrelevant (Chiricos, Eschholz and Gertz 1997: 342). Despite strong arguments and circumstantial evidence about the link between the media and public perceptions and public policy, empirical tests of the relationship between television viewing and perceptions such as fear of crime, punitive attitudes and attitudes toward the police have proven to be a difficult challenge. Taking these tests one-step further toward testing the causal link between television consumption and public policy through public perceptions is an even more daunting task. Researchers have long grappled with the question of whether or not watching television broadcasts has a causal link with public perceptions, and the issue of causality remains unresolved in the literature. Although television may result in changes in audience members perceptions of crime and the criminal justice system, it is also possible as Oliver (1996) suggests that individuals with certain character traits are more likely to select television programming that matches their interests and ideological orientation toward the world. Initial tests of the relationship between television viewing and viewers perceptions used Gerbners (1976) cultivation model and compared individuals with low television consumption with individuals with high television consumption in terms of fear of crime and other perceptual measures. These studies produced mixed results and generally led researchers to conclude that the relationship between television and crime related anxiety was more complicated and models of media effects on public perceptions needed to account for both characteristics of the content of the programming and audience characteristics as suggested by the field of reception research (Eschholz 1997; Health and Gilbert 1996). Most recent research in this area includes tests of either specific television genres and/or tests of specific audience sub-populations. Although this body of research is anything but definitive, some general patterns can be noted from these types of studies. The overwhelming majority of tests of the television genre and fear of crime relationship have focused on crime drama and television news. The majority of crime drama fear tests found no significant relationships (Potter and Chang 1990; Heath and Petraitis 1987; OKeefe and Reid Nash 1987; OKeefe 1984), but when a significant relationship was found it was usually in a positive direction (Rubin, Perse and Taylor 1988; Slater and Elliot 1982; Hawkins and Pingree 1981; Gerbner et al. 1977). The relationship between watching television news and fear of crime was more consistently positive and significant than crime drama tests (Chiricos, et al. 1997; OKeefe and Reid Nash 1987; OKeefe 1984;), especially when testing only the local news fear of crime relationship (Chiricos, 13

Padgett and Gertz 2000; Chiricos et al. 1997; Eschholz et al. 1998; Bazargan 1994). Similarly, a local news study found a positive correlation between television news exposure and support for punitive measures, such as making sentences more severe, executing more murderers and locking up more juvenile offenders (Eschholz et al. 1998). Past research has also drawn attention to the possible mediating effect of particular audience characteristics on the television fear of crime relationship. The variables that have been examined most frequently are sex, race, age, victim status, crime in the neighborhood and perceived realism of program. The findings for sex are mixed, but the most discernable pattern is that watching television news increases fear of crime for women, but usually not for men (Chiricos et al. 2000; Chiricos et al. 1997). However, watching crime drama programming increases fear of crime for men, and to a lesser extent for women as well (Heath and Petraitis 1987; Gerbner et al. 1977). Findings for race, age and prior victimization show no consistent pattern across studies (Eschholz, Chiricos and Gertz, 2000).

All of the studies that have explored the television fear of crime relationship in the context of disaggregating based on high and low crime neighborhoods have found a positive and significant television effect among high crime areas and no effect among low crime neighborhoods (Chiricos et al. 2000; Heath and Petraitis 1987; Gerbner et al. 1980; Doob and McDonald 1979). Although few studies have partitioned their samples based on audience perceptions of program realism, there does appear to be stronger television effects among audience who perceive the content of television programs as realistic (Chiricos et al. 2000; Potter, 1986). While studies including content characteristics or audience traits have done much to further this area of inquiry there is still a dearth of research that combine these two areas of inquiry. One such study examining reality police programs and attitudes toward the police found that race was the most important audience characteristic in predicting the presence of a television attitude relationship (Eschholz, Blackwell, Gertz, and Chiricos, 2002). This study found a positive and significant relationship between watching reality police programs and favorable attitudes toward the police among Whites, who incidentally were more frequently shown as officers than offenders on these programs. No relationship was found for African Americans, who were disproportionately shown as offenders rather than victims or officers on these programs. More research is needed that includes both content characteristics and audience traits in the same model to unravel the specifics of the television and public perception about crime and criminal justice relationship. Although theoretical arguments abound that link perceptions such as fear of crime, punitive attitudes and attitudes toward the police to public policy (Chiricos 1995; Melossi 1985; Garland 2000) there are few direct empirical tests of these models. A recent study in Georgia found that individuals with higher fear levels were less likely to participate in their communities and less likely to volunteer their time and money to philanthropy, this relationship was strongest among individuals in disadvantaged groups like minorities and women (Eschholz and Van Slyke 2001). More work is needed that ties the theoretical arguments concerning the media and crime policy research with both qualitative studies of moral panics and quantitative studies testing specific links between media content, viewers perceptions, viewers behaviors and crime policy. Conclusions 14

While the studies of the relationship between television content, television viewing, public perceptions, individual behavior and public policy leaves us with many questions, there are several conclusions that we can draw. First, television programming, whether they be nonfictional programs like the news and reality police programs or crime drama programs, presents a very distorted picture of the American crime problem. Images of violent crime predominate on television programming, and the inverse is true in reality where property crime and corporate crime is much more prevalent. As a result of this television inversion, and the lack of education concerning the actual crime problem in the United States through other sources, members of the general public (and some would argue most politicians as well) know very little about the real crime problem in the United States. How can people who are misinformed make informed policy decisions about the crime problem? To further complicate this problem, the type of crime programming currently available is more likely to exacerbate racial tensions associated with crime than to alleviate them. African Americans are more frequently shown in offender than police officer or victim roles, whereas the reverse is true for Whites (Chiricos and Eschholz 2002; Eschholz 2003). This may further reinforce in the public mind the image of the Black male as criminal

that was presented in the media during the civil rights movement (Barlow 1998) and in advertisements for Bushs presidential campaign using Willie Horton (Jamieson 1992; Mendelberg 1997). In addition to the connection found between viewing reality police programming and attitudes toward the police that are divided along racial lines (Eschholz, et al. 2002a), some have suggested that these stereotypes of black male offenders have led to increasingly punitive policy that has disproportionately impacted young black males (Beckett and Sasson 2000). Garland argues that media images of violent crack heads and alienated, angry self-destructive underclass may foster crime fear that is closely related to fear of strangers especially black males (2000:153). Those individuals with high levels of crime fear and who support increasingly punitive measures may be less likely to consider policy measures that get to the roots of much of todays crime problem, and instead focus on laws such as Floridas 10-20-Life law or the three strikes laws in California, or mandatory minimum sentencing laws increasingly found across the county. Since their enactment, many of these laws have been challenged in the courts, as well as by academics and government officials who, now that the economy is not performing as well and budgets are being squeezed, are realizing the cost of these measures along with their inefficiency in dealing with the crime problem. While the media is certainly not responsible for the crime problem or for crime policy, these studies show the media plays an important role both in providing information to the general public and to politicians, and in structuring the agenda of much of the public policy debate by choosing to focus so much time on crime issues.

References 15

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REPORTING ON THE MISSOURI DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS TO THE MEDIA Tim Kniest*

The Business of News

he world is a changing place and how that change is presented is quite often referred to as news. The flow of information is so fast now that we dont just have news, we have news alerts and breaking news, and even news coverage that creates news alerts.

As an example, remember the Connie Chung interview with Newt Gingrichs mother? The just between you and me interview when mama Newt told Connie that her Newtie thought Hillary was a, well you remember dont you? The way Connie lured Mrs. Gingrich into the answer became as important as the interview. In fact, how the interview was conducted became THE story. To a great degree this is what has become of the fast paced, ever hungry news industry that lives in our television sets and computers and within magazines and newspapers, 24/7. But it also reflects what we are interested in as news consumers and what we will watch and read. We see car chases that happen on the San Diego Freeway that have no significant to us, but the cars go fast, it is dangerous and very likely someone is going to get hurt. We watch news reports on whether the ex-presidents son is dead in a plane crash with speculation as to his fitness as a pilot. We learn that the Princess of Wales has been killed in Paris with speculation on the role the paparazzi may have played in her death. These stories are news. They should be covered, but must we be smothered with speculation and innuendo? Well of course we must, because in the main, that is what we have told the news media what interests us and the more we watch and listen, the higher the ratings, and the higher the ratings the more money the news media make. The competition for news stories is fierce and their presentation determines who will watch and for how long. Big stories are marked with somber music and graphics that attack our senses. The importance of a story is influenced to a great degree not just by the content of the story, but how it will sell to the demographic target audiences. Thats how business is conducted in America. We market and sell. News, and the people who make news, are one more commodity. Another commodity packaged in a way that we as consumers will buy.

Copyright 2003, Mr. Tim Kniest, published here by permission. Correspondence should be addressed to author, Missouri Department of Corrections, P.O. Box 236 Jefferson City, MO 65102..

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The Effect on Government Agencies An advantage I have, as a public spokesman for a state governmental agency in Missouri, is that I am not in New York or Los Angeles. Pity the poor spokesperson who must negotiate the terrain in these centers of media competition. Of course, if Missouri suffers a deadly prison riot or a spectacle of scandal the Show-Me State can quickly evolve into the TV-Show-Me State. Let me share with you a story prepared by Fox-2 News in St. Louis. This is a story that questions whether inmates with long sentences should be required to attend school and earn their GEDs while incarcerated. One of the key pieces of information we provided was that inmates with a GED had fewer conduct violations than inmates with lesser education. This is important for the safety of staff and inmates and the security of the institution. It is a cost effective, humane, and productive way to increase institutional safety and security, and in Missouri it is the law. We provided statistics to that effect on paper, in black and white, and during our interview on tape. The reporter chose to ask the inmate whether these guys were right. The inmate had not seen the statistics and had a vested interest in not going to school. But he was now an expert on the policy of education in a prison setting. The objective I have as a Public Information Officer is to provide accurate information concerning the operations of the Department of Corrections. The restrictions I have are not to provide information that jeopardizes the safety of our staff, the security of our institutions, confidentiality statutes or Department operations. It is information that helps define why we do what we do for the taxpayers and citizens of the State. Working with Reporters Many of the reporters that I come in contact with know very little about corrections, and in many instances, the criminal justice system. In corrections we not only have to combat the lack of knowledge others have about our system, but the myths, hearsay and speculation that surrounds our profession. Many times the only things that the public, including reporters, editors, and producers, know about corrections is what they have seen on television or in the movies. There is very little first hand experience. The result is that there is a natural suspicion of corrections, our operations, and our motives in managing offenders. This is in addition to the natural suspicion of government in general. I spend a considerable amount of time explaining why we do what we do and how it is done. Some might consider that to be spinning but I believe it is a matter of defining the who, what, where, when, why and how of our operations. Let me share with you another news story. This one is from Channel 4 in St. Louis. This gist of the story concerned a very ill capital punishment inmate from St. Louis who was receiving medical care for his ailments. Medical care that was mandated by the statutes of Missouri and decisions made in state and federal courts. 20

I understand why this is such a compelling story, but I believe that comparing the constitutionally mandated health care of inmates to the lack of care for victims is apples and oranges. The two individuals are related by the crime, but they represent two different groups of people in two different sets of circumstances. There is a program for victims relief, the State Victims Compensation Fund. Information was provided to the reporter on how the victim could access the Fund and who managed it, yet there was no mention of the victims opportunity for assistance. If you asked the reporter she would probably say she did not have enough time, but I would suggest that it was because it interfered with the emotion of the story. The story played much better pitting inmate against victim and the system against the victim. To be an effective spokesperson one must be vigilant about providing information in a concise manner that is easy to understand and can be digested while the viewer is eating dinner or burping the baby. An effective spokesperson must learn to define, not defend the agencys position on a subject and base his or her statements on policy and statute. He or she must tell the truth as completely and accurately as one can without jeopardizing department operations, safety or security. Unlike the media, we cannot speculate or guess. With that simple, but not simplistic, thought in mind Define, not Defend the role of the spokesperson becomes much clearer. And the clearer he or she is, the better the audience and the reporter will understand the message. Getting Your Message Out There is an old story that when former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, held a news briefing he would ask the reporters if they had any questions for his answers. I dont know if the Kissinger story is true, but there is truth within the tale. The public spokesperson must have a plan to deliver his or her message and prepare for the interview. Preparation includes researching the subject, organizing your thoughts into clear, concise points and rehearsing how you are going to answer questions. To watch this technique in action all one has to do is to watch news interviews. Politicians and spokesperson redirect questions with answers they have prepared in order to reinforce their message. That is the business of communication in todays world. It is the way messages are sent to the public. The vast majority of reporters I work with are hard working professionals who want to do a good job. They are fair and will give you an opportunity to fully answer their questions and provide data and evidence to support your answers. The concern I have is how their business has changed. Reporters, in some instances, are ambulance chasers. They are hit and run experts covering sensational and simple stories to produce higher ratings. And that is what we, as consumers, have told them we want. In a world that is more and more complex, where attention spans are short and the audience is more attracted to sensationalism and simplicity, todays journalists and audiences are faced with a dilemma. The media must balance the business of news with the profession of journalism and we must recognize our role as a consumer to balance the 21

desire to be entertained with the responsibility of being an informed citizen. The answer to these shared responsibilities will determine how we will understand our world, how we solve our collective problems, and how we sustain our civilization.

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TABLOID TALES: OTHER NEWS, OTHER VOICES Brett Mills*

efending the nature and content of tabloid news is often seen merely as an overtly populist desire to justify the popular (Sparks 1992: 42), or a reluctant task which acknowledges the increasing inability for proper news to be communicated to those who are seen to need it. That is, to defend tabloidism is to accept its flaws, and its detrimental effects upon the whole scope of journalism, and so instead try to make some sense of how and why this should be. What is seen as a recent trend towards tabloidism in Western media is blamed on the publics decreasing interest in, and understanding of, a range of global and social phenomena, and media industries in which the hard facts of economics and profits support editorial practices which are predominantly audience-centred (Bromley 1998: 25-35, Dovey 2000: 1-17). The astonishingly low turnouts in recent national elections in many Western countries, then, are seen not only as indicative of a failure by the public to see a value in voting, but also suggest that the media, in chasing that public, will continue to tell tabloid tales (Calcutt 1998: 165). Yet this sits difficultly with recent public responses to political events. So, while the British national elections of 2001 recorded the lowest voter turnout ever, 2002-3 saw a string of large-scale demonstrations descend upon London, culminating in the Stop the War March of 15 February 2003, the largest public demonstration that country has ever seen.i And this was part of similar global demonstrations, in which three million marched through Rome, and similar demonstrations were seen across Europe, Australia, and North and South America. Of course, comparing engagement in the political process in 2001 and 2003 has flaws; it is likely, after all, that voter turnout would have been much higher if policy on Iraq had been a part of 2001s manifestos. However, these two contradictory moments also symbolise the different ways in which the publics relationships with politics, society, and identity politics are now practised and understood. More importantly, actively engaged in this debate is tabloid journalism, a form commonly vilified but which connects to audiences in the way that political demonstrations and marches do. Indeed, it is highly significant that it was a tabloid The Mirror in Britain which has the most active and vocal anti-war voice in British media, and which helped organise and sponsor the marches in Britain. Defining Tabloid One of the primary problems in this debate is defining exactly what is meant by tabloid. With its origins in mere paper size now virtually redundant, the term has instead come to mean a certain mode of expression. Furthermore, while tabloid has its roots in newspapers, it is now equally applicable to television (though rarely, for some reason, to radio or film), or, as the title of Glynns book makes clear, there is now a

Copyright 2003, Dr Brett Mills, published here by permission. Correspondence should be addressed to author, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Forest Hall, University of Glamorgan, CF37 1DL Wales, UK. 23

whole Tabloid Culture (2000). Fiske distinguishes between three types of news; official, alternative, and popular (1992: 47). Official news is that of the quality press and network television (ibid.); alternative news comes from, and speaks to, politically active sources, often promoting radical views and social activism; popular news also known as tabloid focuses on the intersection between public and private life (48). In this way, each of these forms of news is primarily defined by content. However, clearly there is more to these distinctions than what they choose to include and exclude. After all, each of these forms covered the recent anti-war marches, even if the actual specifics of exactly which bits of information were deemed relevant differed. The distinction, then, is not one of what is covered, but how. So Fiske notes that official newss tone is serious, official, impersonal, and is aimed at producing understanding and belief (47). Alternative news, instead, demonstrates and relies upon its politicization of the selection of events (ibid.), making clear the impetus behind its agenda. However, while there are clear distinctions between official and alternative news, Glynn highlights significant similarities between them. Most importantly, both are principally concerned with speaking to middle-class audiences (2000:6), even if they do so in slightly different ways, and even if they connect to different subsections of that middle-class audience. In this way, they can be seen to end up doing virtually the same thing; or, at least, to end up talking about the same things. That is, while official and alternative news may report on, and discuss, any event in contradictory ways, they dont disagree that such an event is inherently newsworthy. And by speaking to, and on behalf of, a middle-class audience, they repeatedly legitimise that groups agenda as one of importance. Tabloid media, however, refuses to be so concretely classified. Fiske notes some of its attributes: its style is sensational, sometimes sceptical, sometimes moralistically earnest; its tone is populist; its modality fluidly denies any stylistic difference between fiction and documentary, between news and entertainment (1992: 48). In this way, tabloid media is seen more as a way of telling stories than something which defines an agenda, one which is sensational and populist, whatever they mean. Indeed, the difficulty in defining tabloid media, and deciding whether the relevant criteria are ones associated with form, content, or a mixture of the two, are representative of a whole bunch of terms in the analysis of media which have a public understanding but which are notoriously difficult to outline in any concrete manner. Glynn, then, places such a debate within concerns about whom tabloid media speaks to and for. That is, while it is possible to outline characteristics which recur across the form and content of tabloid media, an analysis which unearths its relationship with its (intended) audience, and which distinguishes that audience from those for other forms of news, not only helps define it, but may also lead to an understanding of why such differences exist. Therefore, the designations highbrow, midcult, and lowbrow bear an important relationship to the particular social groups that consume the objects thus categorized. (2000:4). This has significant implications for both the production and consumption of all forms of media, and the specific categories of news. That is, the clear production of news media, which is either official, alternative, or tabloid, demonstrates the industrys awareness of the segmentation of its audience, not only in what it finds newsworthy, but also in the ways in which it wants its news to be told. Similarly, for the audience, the choice of news product becomes one of the ways in which identity can be constructed and, more significantly, such identity can be assumed to be similar to that for other consumers of similar media. It is this discrete dividing of news forms and news consumers into types that is at the core of the existence of these forms of journalism. That is, the construction of individual and group identity around the belief in a specific form of news delivery relies not only on the existence of that form, but also on the availability of contradictory forms against which legitimacy can be measured. In this way, official news can be defined as much by its
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differences to alternative and tabloid news than it can by any inherent characteristic of its own. Perhaps more importantly, tabloid news clearly positions itself as to be as different as possible often in content, but certainty in form and style to the more legitimate forms. When Glynn notes that tabloid journalism is generally offensive to high- and middlebrow tastes (2000: 7), his statement rests on the assumption that this is an actively sought offence, and one which tabloidism requires for its legitimacy, effectiveness, and appeal, rather than an unfortunate by-product of a different way of telling the news. Of course, such distinctions are a matter of degree; and, in fact, considering recent worries about the dumbing down (Bromley 1998: 35, Dovey 2000: 1) of official news, may be becoming irrelevant. Still, the distinction is one which is vital to the maintenance of the authority of the legitimate forms, and is therefore one which such forms will make claim to as often as possible. So, while there has indeed been a convergence of news values among the tabloid and broadsheet press (Bromley 1998: 26), the requirement by broadsheets to maintain a distinction between themselves and the tabloids is as apparent as it always has been. The reasons for this are many, and I shall return to them later. However, what is significant for the moment is that the primary way in which the authority of legitimate forms is maintained is through debates about what constitutes proper journalism, and the social roles which journalism, and, more broadly, the media as a whole, should perform. Assumptions About Journalism; Assumptions About Media While journalism clearly occupies a significant position within everyday cultural and social life, its forms are discussed surprisingly little in public forums. This is not to say, of course, that the industry itself is not continually debating the ways in which it can best tell its stories. Certainly in Britain, there are a range of codes and publications outlining good journalistic practice, whether these are industry-wide or specific to certain publications. On a bigger scale, the BBC, in making its application for its Charter renewal every decade, must clearly demonstrate a commitment to quality journalism, in line with its core Reithian principle to inform, educate, and entertainii. Finally, Britain has a number of agencies and commissions such as the Press Complaints Commission, the Broadcasting Standards Commission, and the soon to be empowered OfComiii to whom individuals and groups can complain if its felt that journalistic practices are not being upheld. Such agencies, and the ways in which they attempt to come to terms with differing views over what constitutes acceptable journalistic practice symbolise the heart of the debate about what journalism and media should be, and the effects they have (or dont have) upon society. On a broader, public scale, these debates feed into assumptions which consumers and publics have about the media, and the ways in which this industry should bring required information to them. At the heart of all this are a set of assumptions about journalism which, if rarely questioned, are certainly rarely discussed in a manner which acknowledges the possibilities of what journalism could be. That is, such debates and the decisions made by regulators often work from simplistic notions of the role of journalism; more importantly, such notions are ones which, albeit incidentally, serve to repeatedly legitimise certain forms of journalism over others. Above and beyond all other criteria is the assumption that News at all levels always has to be duly impartial (Wilson 1996:41). As the conduit of information from a range of sources to the public, the notion of any form of deliberately intrusive mediation is deemed to be the worst crime which can be committed by journalism. Certainly, concerns about the
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effects of commercialism on journalisms objectivity are very apparent, with voices raised over, say, the consistent political stances adopted by much of the media owned by Rupert Murdoch (Sparks 1992: 39, Curran 1996: 96). Indeed, one of the primary ways in which the BBC justifies its licence fee is that as it is not beholden to any shareholders or commercial imperatives, it can maintain journalistic impartiality.iv Yet impartiality is a complex term and, more importantly, a practical impossibility. That is, at every point within the news process decisions about what is to be told, and how it is to be told, clearly invoke some kind of agenda about what is and isnt newsworthy, and how such worth should be demonstrated. Comparisons among the broadsheets supposedly operating with impartiality show that stories are told in different ways, and prioritised according to differing agendas. It can never be forgotten that journalism is a human process, and the fallibility of human judgement denies complete impartiality (Wilson 1996: 43). Of course, media organisations and journalists have continually grappled with this problem. Wilson notes that the British regulators, accepting that impartiality can never be attained, instead speak in terms of balance, and state that journalism should recognise the relevant range of views on issues (41). Impartiality becomes, then, not some kind of idealised scientific objectivity, but instead a process in which the complex nature of issues is highlighted, and the multifarious positions shown reveal the impossibility of any kind of truth, or coherent conclusion. Yet this is not how much journalism particularly official or alternative journalism can be seen to present itself. Alternative journalism, in its wish to engender political activism and reveal aspects of debates previously ignored, implicitly stakes a claim to be revealing a truth which other forms of journalism are ignoring. That is, while alternative journalism makes its mediation and political bias clear, it does so in a manner which suggests that that political stance is one essential to a fuller understanding of any issue. More significantly, the authority of official journalism rests on the assumption that it is objective and that its agenda is natural. And while the majority of the public are unlikely to disagree that stories about warfare, large-scale disasters, and other matters of broader, national and political relevance (Connell 1991: 236) are the kinds of stories which should be told and include information which should be made available to them, it cannot be forgotten that this does not make the selection of such stories natural, it merely naturalises them. It is this attempt to naturalise the news-making decision process which is at the core of official journalism, and the ways in which its forms of speech, its ways of telling stories, and the interplay between the visual and the verbal are carried out all serve not only to create a coherent and easily recognisable format which convince audiences of its legitimacy, but also does so in a manner which suggests that this is the only and best way in which it can be done. The importance of such methods of communicating information to the public is seen as vital because of the general role that media is seen as having; or, perhaps more truthfully, the negative role that it is seen as possible for the media to have if it is not in some way controlled. While debates about media effects are still very open and up for grabs,v there is still an assumption that without good media, democracy cannot survive (Bertrand 1998: 121). In this way, the media is seen as an important intermediary between the process of government, the law, and business on the one hand, and the public on the other. Indeed, since the low voter turnout in the British elections of 2001, the BBC undertook a massive appraisal of its political output, resulting in the axing of many programmes and the introduction of a range of programming intended to more actively engage the public particularly the young in the political process.vi It was notable in this process that the failure of young people to see the value of their right to vote was primarily defined as a media problem, and that it was the media who changed its output; it was only a minority who suggested that the problem might actually lie with politics itself, and that it was
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the nature of the political process which might need to change if there was to be any chance of the publics reengagement with it. The media, then, is seen as vital to the way in which a number of societies function, and this clearly relates to the Habermasian notion of the public sphere: The public sphere is a concept which in the context of todays society points to the issues of how and to what extent the mass media, especially in their journalistic role, can help citizens learn about the world, debate their responses to it and reach informed decisions about what courses of action to adopt. (Dahlgren 1991: 1) The media, then, is more than simply a reporter of information, or a conduit through which relevant material can be transported to an eager public. Instead, the media itself becomes a vital part of the democratic process, an essential component of democracy, and as of much relevance to the process as the public and politics itself. It is in this public sphere that the relationship between the public and the policies which affect it are not only communicated and questioned, but are actually played out; it is through the media that that democratic process becomes in any way meaningful. And it is because of the medias centrality to this process that debates about the nature of its mediation become vital, and the necessity for using appropriate and relevant journalistic forms becomes apparent. What is significant about the public sphere, however, is that it is silent on alternative, plebeian, popular, informal or oppositional public spheres (Dahlgren 1991: 6). That is, while the public sphere operates as a place in which vital public issues can be discussed, it conventionally does so through the very assumptions about journalism and the media which official journalism adhere to. So, while the notion of the public sphere is one which is conventionally seen as essential to democracy because an active and informed public is one which can more effectively question the institutions and policies which affect it, the ways in which this can be achieved are very narrowly defined. Even though a public empowered by the media is able to question politics, its unlikely that it will question the very nature, and importance, of politics itself. In this way, traditional notions of the public sphere serve to legitimise a whole set of processes, even if they open up debates concerning the specifics of those processes. The BBCs redesigning of its political coverage, then, is an attempt to engage more people with politics; it never raises the question of whether politics is itself of any value. More importantly, it supports traditional methods of engagement with political issues, which are based around intelligent discussion and rational debate. What is doesnt do is support or promote different ways of engaging with debates; because of this, the public sphere is only capable of reporting events such as Stop the War Marches, rather than actively engaging with them, or presenting them as vital parts of the political process. We have a rather clever sleight of hand here, then, in that, by being seen to offer the public access to a whole range of debates the public sphere is defined as helping the democratic process, yet it does so by normalising a whole set of processes as the ways in which this should be carried out. There is an important congruence between official journalism and the public sphere, then, in which a certain number of voices, as well as a limited number of processes, are not only presented as the correct way in which the democratic process can be mediated, but also normalised to the extent that all other voices or actions are clearly seen as deviant, immoral, unhelpful, and, sometimes, unlawful. Conversely, then, there is a clear relationship between the ways in which a whole set of different voices express themselves, and the things which they choose to talk about. Official
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journalism rests on, and perpetuates, the assumption that there are a limited number of acceptable things to talk about, and ways to talk about them: the vilification of tabloid journalism, then, not only requires such assumptions, but helps to maintain such a system. Quality Journalism and Acceptable Voices It seems odd that the maintenance of a democracy which is representative of, and for, the wide variety of peoples which make up any nation should base itself around constructing a method of debate which limits not only what can be talked about, but also the ways in which it can be talked about, and by whom. Central to the voice which is adopted and promoted by serious journalism is the notion of seriousness (Glynn 2000: 101). This manifests itself in two ways. Firstly, seriousness informs the agenda which quality journalism adopts. It is assumed that something becomes newsworthy because it is of serious importance, and the ways in which that seriousness are defined are connected to notions of government, and the impact of any event upon large numbers of people (or, to be more precise, significant enough numbers of the right kind of people). Of course, in this instance seriousness also works in reverse: the application of a serious enough tone to a piece of news automatically renders it serious and, thus newsworthy. In this way, the choice of agenda and the manner in which that agenda is presented is a self-serving system, in which seriousness is both the producer and the product of its legitimacy. Secondly, seriousness becomes the manner in which such news is reported, talked about, and presented. The kinds of music, the layout of sets, the use of language, and so on, of television news are all aspects of the production which denote seriousness (Hartley 1982): similarly, the distinguishing characteristics between broadsheet and tabloid press are as much to do with the use of typefaces and photography, and the tone of the written material as much as it is to do with what written material is included. In this way, the distinctions between tabloid and quality journalism conform to a whole set of categorisations which legitimise the serious over the comic, and the elite over the popular. Glynn makes concrete links between tabloid culture and popular culture as a whole, finding that the vilification of the former is a result of its use of the characteristics of popular culture, and dominant cultures rejection of such formats (2000: 8-9). In addition: The construction of a cultural hierarchy that distinguishes serious journalism from disreputable tabloidism is an important example of the more general process whereby dominant social taste formations elevate themselves culturally and exclude others from apparent worthiness. The creation of an exclusive and inegalitarian sphere of respectable middle-class culture always depends on the production of hierarchies that differentiate between legitimate and vulgar tastes. (101) In this way, the cultural position afforded to tabloidism is one representative not only of cultural distinctions generally, but which points to general social distinctions, and, more significantly, to structures of power within society. That is, the legitimisation of certain agendas and methods of representation has a powerful social effect in excluding vast sections of the populace from the news agenda. And it does so not only by rendering a whole range of events as unnewsworthy, but it also deems ways of talking about news events as
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illegitimate, ill-informed, and unauthoritative, and thus, with no right to be heard. The news does not conform to an agenda which is normal, objective and true (and nor could it, if it tried to), but by presenting its agenda as such it renders a whole different slew of approaches, opinions, and voices silent. This clearly has political implications. As Connell notes, We have forgotten that politics is about all and any manifestation of power (1991: 242), and the establishment of who is and isnt able to have access to media is a phenomenally powerful method of silencing certain voices. Tabloids and Freedom of Speech If we are to accept that the media can, and should, have a role in the successful functioning of a democracy, then clearly it needs to, as fully as possible, speak for, and respond to, as wide a variety of social groups and individuals as possible. It is in this way which tabloid journalism fulfils a significant democratic role which is not only ignored by quality media, but actively vilified by it. There can be little doubt that tabloids put into the public domain ways of thinking which quality journalism would fail to authorise; similarly, there can be little doubt that tabloids use modes of expression which quality journalism would fail to authorise. In these senses, they clearly adopt and promote a much wider agenda than that for quality journalism. More importantly, it can be argued that this is an agenda which is public-led, rather than quality journalisms power-led agenda. One of the primary ways in which this is achieved is through a blurring of the distinctions that could once have been drawn between the public and private spheres (Connell 1991: 251). The development of a paparazzi culture and an interest in the private activities of public figures has rendered the distinctions between these spheres as almost irrelevant, and means that President Clinton will always be remembered more for his private affairs than any public ones. At the time of the Lewinsky affair debates consistently raged about whether the American government and judiciary system should be taking so much time and money investigating the President rather than just letting him get on with his job; in effect, supporters of Clintons privacy were arguing for the maintenance of the individuals choice to decide what is public and what is private. Yet the right for governments to choose what they need and need not tell their public clearly has dangerous consequences for the continuance of a well-informed electorate. Tabloids lack of distinction between the public and the private demonstrates the ways in which these spheres interact and inform each other, and this is of particular importance when governments are themselves allowed to probe into the private lives of their citizens. Official journalism has traditionally supported the notion that those in power can investigate those whom it rules, while those ruled cant investigate those in power; tabloid journalism sees no distinction, and in doing so undermines a set of social structures vital for the maintenance of power structures. Taking this further, tabloidism has often been criticised for its interest in the personal, and failing to make connections between that and the bigger picture of politics, society, and so on. Its always seemed odd that the opposite is never argued; that in exploring the bigger picture, official journalism fails to see the public as individuals, and doesnt relate changes in policy to anything other than broadly defined groups. By focussing squarely on the individual, tabloids instead make a powerful case for the individualism of the person, refusing to render a person as nothing more than a set of characteristics. Tabloids repeated use of the first person in telling its stories not only allows those involved to speak for themselves, rather than through the legitimate voice of quality journalism, but also
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demands that any individual be understood as nothing more than themselves. This has significant implications for identity politics, for it means that someone becomes defined by what they do, or what has happened to them, rather than merely as someone of a certain class, age, race, or occupation to whom something has happened. In addition, it allows individuals the possibility of defining their own identity, rather than being forced to conform to a pre-existing group. Furthermore, tabloidism helps promote a whole range of lifestyles which are incompatible with the ways of storytelling associated with official journalism. Incessant stories about lifestyles which are conventionally seen as deviant begin to make such deviancies merely commonplace and, through their repetition, nothing out of the ordinary. Added to this is that such stories are often told from the viewpoint of the person themselves, legitimising a voice and a lifestyle which is traditionally either ignored or, if covered by quality journalism at all, filtered through the dominant ideologies of the voice of authority. And while tabloids are often criticised for doing precisely the same thing and marking deviancy as such through hysterical language and screaming headlines, its notable that such readings can only take place if it is assumed that theres an objective norm in which a story can be told which renders it not sensationalised; yet all news is, by its very nature, sensationalist. The criticism here seems to be that tabloid reporting acknowledges, and exploits and plays with its very sensationalism, which could more usefully be seen as a medium making explicit its mediation, and making no pretence to natural objectivity. In these ways, tabloid media serve as a powerful force in repeatedly disrupting accepted ways of making sense of the world, and undermine not only a whole range of norms, but the very notion of normality itself. Instead, everything becomes nothing more than a bunch of stories about a bunch of individuals. And the disruption of a system of norms is obviously a powerful threat to any kind of authority of system of power, which necessarily attempts to construct itself as given and natural in order to maintain its position. And the ways in which the public sphere has conventionally been understood, while purportedly attempting to engage a wide range of people within communication, instead only legitimises those who conform to its structural requirements; this is clearly a problem, when a basic requirement of a democratic media system should be that it represents all significant aspects in society (Curran 1991:30). Tabloidism, on the other hand, presents a range of contradictory, complex, unstable, and ill-defined attitudes, lifestyles, and identities whose very shapelessness is part of its point. How to define, create and support a public sphere when theres no consensus as to what the public is? Indeed, Glynn takes to task the notion of the public itself, suggesting that the term implies some sort of coherence to what is, in fact, merely many millions of individuals, who understand themselves and each other in an almost infinite number of ways. We require, then, the emergence of a plurality of dynamic alternative public spheres (Dahlgren 1991: 14), which are not necessarily dependent on either consensus reality or universal rationality (Glynn 2000: 17). And, to put it simply, dominant institutions cannot remain in power unless they manage to convince a large group of people that they

are all, in enough ways, the same. It is this which tabloids refuse to accept, and it is this which is most threatening to dominant powers. Tabloids represent and support the very mutable individual nature of identity and experience; and these are notions which are not only incomprehensible to anyone who wishes to maintain any kind of social and cultural power, but are also highly threatening.

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Bibliography
Bertrand, Claude-Jean (1998) Media Quality Control in the USA and Europe, In Hugh Stephenson and Michael Bromley (eds.) Sex, Lies and Democracy: The Press and the Public, London and New York, Longman. Bromley, Michael (1998) The Tabloiding of Britain: Quality Newspapers in the 1990s, In Hugh Stephenson and Michael Bromley (eds.) Sex, Lies and Democracy: The Press and the Public, London and New York, Longman. Calcutt, Andrew (1998) Democracy Under Threat, In Hugh Stephenson and Michael Bromley (eds.) Sex, Lies and Democracy: The Press and the Public, London and New York, Longman. Connell, Ian (1991) Tales of Tellyland: the Popular Press and Television in the UK, In Peter Dahlgren and Colin Sparks (eds.) Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere, London and New York: Routledge. Curran, James (1991) Rethinking the Media as a Public Sphere, In Peter Dahlgren and Colin Sparks (eds.) Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere, London and New York: Routledge. Curran, James (1996) Mass Media and Democracy Revisited, In James Curran and Michael Gurevitch (eds.) Mass Media and Society (2nd edition), London: Arnold. Dahlgren, Peter (1991) Introduction, In Peter Dahlgren and Colin Sparks (eds.) Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere, London and New York: Routledge. Dahlgren, Peter and Sparks, Colin (eds.) (1991) Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and the Public Sphere, London and New York: Routledge. Dahlgren, Peter and Sparks, Colin (eds.) (1992) Journalism and Popular Culture, London: Sage. Dovey, Jon (2000) Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television, London: Pluto Press. Fiske, John (1992) Popularity and the Politics of Information, In Peter Dahlgren and Colin Sparks (eds.) Journalism and Popular Culture, London: Sage. Gauntlett, David (1998) Ten Things Wrong With the Effects Model, In Roger Dickinson, Ramaswami Harindranath, and Olga Linn (eds.) Approaches to Audiences: A Reader, London: Arnold. Glynn, Kevin (2000) Tabloid Culture: Trash Taste, Popular Power, and the Transformation of American Television, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Harrison, Jackie (2001) The BBC and Impartiality, In Glen Creeber (ed.) The Television Genre Book, London: British Film Institute. Hartley, John (1982) Understanding News, London and New York: Routledge. Sparks, Colin (1992) Popular Journalism: Theories and Practice, In Peter Dahlgren and Colin Sparks (eds.) Journalism and Popular Culture, London: Sage. Stephenson, Hugh and Bromley, Michael (eds.) (1998) Sex, Lies and Democracy: The Press and the Public, London and New York, Longman. Wilson, John (1996) Understanding Journalism: a Guide to Issues, London and New York: Routledge.

Endnotes
i

See www.stopwar.org.uk See www.bbc.co.uk/info/bbc/charter.html iii See www.pcc.org.uk, www.bsc.org.uk, and www.ofcom.org.uk
ii

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iv

Of course, this ignores the fact that the BBC is, instead, beholden to the Government which ratifies its Charter and sets its funding level; see Harrison (2001). v For the most coherent demolition of assumptions about media effects, see Gauntlett (1998). vi In 2003 the BBC axed the long -running On the Record and Despatch Box , and replaced them with The Politics Show and The Daily Politics.

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NOBODY LOVES A CRIME REPORTER David J. Krajicek*

any of the medias sharpest critics view it as an immovable and impersonal monolith. But I see its human face in the men and women rowing the boat in the dark and dingy hold of the media mother ship. Ive been at those oars myself, and I would like to witness on behalf of the lowly and beleaguered crime reporters, the Gunga Dins of journalism. If you will, please consider what we crime reporters do, why we do it, and some of the fresh challenges we face.

Stanley Walker, editor of the New York Herald Tribune, wrote an elegant definition of news decades ago. It went like this: News is the inexact measure of the ebb and flow of the tides of human aspiration, the ignominy of mankind, the glory of the human race. It is the best record we have of the incredible meanness and the magnificent courage of man.'' The emphasis in that first sentence is properly placed on inexact. Journalism is about telling stories, according to a favorite media aphorism. If that is the case, what beat is better than crime, which produces so many stories about meanness and courage, heroes and goats, Samaritans and scoundrels? As Edna Buchanan, the legendary Miami Herald crime reporter, put it in her memoir, the crime beat has it all: greed, sex, violence, comedy and tragedy. I suppose we see more tragedy than comedy. Crime, after all, is a bad-news beat. Often we crime journalists are accused of dwelling on the negative. In his memoir, Russell Baker said he first faced the negativity criticism as a Baltimore Sun police reporter in the late 1940s. Baker wrote, It happened, didnt it? That was a sentence I was to use many times in years to come when dealing with desperate people who believed that terrible things didnt really happen unless they were reported in the newspaper. It happened, didnt it? Keeping it out of the paper cant make it unhappen. Edna Buchanan wrote of the phenomenon in a chapter of her memoir entitled Nobody Loves a Police Reporter: To be a police reporter is to be an unwelcome intruder. It can be lonesome and arduous. People blame you for the bad news. Its human nature: Somebody gets in trouble, you report it, and he turns on you like its your fault, not his, that he is in this mess. The truth can get you in a lot of trouble. Like few other news beats, crime requires a reporter to juggle many forms of news. At most newspapers and radio and TV stations, the crime reporter will cover an array of stories-from traffic tie-ups and fires to homicides and airplane crashes. The beat is synonymous
Copyright 2003, David J. Krajicek, published here by permission. Correspondence should be addressed to author, DKrajicek@aol.com.
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with breaking news. Ray Ring, a former Arizona newspaperman, wrote a novel some time ago in which he described the anxiety-inducing tension of journalism. I can tell you what its like to work for a newspaper. Imagine a combine, one of those huge threshing machines that eats up a row of wheat like nothing, bearing right down on you. Youre running in front of it, all day long, day in, day out, just inches in front of the maw, where steel blades are whirring and clacking and waiting for you to get tired or make one slip, The only way to keep the combine off you is to throw it something else to rip apart and digest. What you feed it is stories. Words and photos. Ten inches on this, fifteen inches on thatscraps of news and film that go into the maw where they are processed and dumped out on some page to fill the spaces around the ads. Each story buys you a little time, barely enough to slap together the next storyYou never get far ahead, you never take a breather, all you do is live on the hustle. Always in a rush, always on deadline, you keep scrambling to feed the combine. Thats what its like. And as that combine bears down on us, we have other things to worry about. Here are a few of them: Crime reporters are being scammed by more and more hoax sources, often as phone-callers or e-mailers who materialize with inside information about a breaking-news suspect. Such was the case in the Midwest mailbox bombings of 2002. A supposed roommate of the accused told a Wisconsin newspaper reporter that the suspect killed cats and kept a voodoo mannequin. The details went out on the Associated Press A-wire. It was all made up. The 20-year trend in police reporting has been toward limiting access to real cops in favor of a public information officer (PIO) who serves as an information filter. At crime scenes, we are bullpenned behind ropes and subjected to briefings. Any enterprise reporting that goes beyond the briefing is likely to be viewed unfavorably, as we saw in the 2002 Washington sniper case when the practice of journalists uncovering unauthorized details became the focus of national discussion about media ethics. In Fairfax County, Va., police dispense advice to crime victims, forewarning them about reporters, advising that they are not required to cooperate with journalists, and suggesting they call police before talking. Journalists are targeted at the scenes of breaking news. Reporters were injured or arrested in the past few years at demonstrations in Seattle and Washington and during the federal raid to seize the Cuban Elian Gonzalez in Miami. In 2002, several Minneapolis journalists were injured during rioting that followed the police ricochet shooting of a child in that city. A TV vehicle was torched, and journalists were attacked. In a recent study, the DART Center for Journalism and Trauma at the University of Washington reported 96 percent of journalists surveyed covered at least one
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assignment in 2000 in which they were personally threatened, exposed to events in which people were hurt or killed, or indirectly involved with events in which people are hurt or killed. The violent events list used in the centers survey is torn from the daily worksheet of a crime reporter: vehicle accidents, assaults, murder, injured/dead child, sexual assault, life-threatening illness, other types of casualties, fires, kidnappings or torture, natural disasters, airplane accidents and war. The demands of covering breaking news, the pressure to produce copy, and the subject matter of the crime beat can wear a reporter down. These factors also help account in part for high turnover on the crime beat. The subject matter hardens you. I lost my sense of the basic goodness of mankind after 5 years on the crime beat in New York City in the late 1980s, when roughly 10,000 people were murdered in the city. Journalist Russell Baker wrote that crime reporters dwell on the wretched underside of a community. He said those who are successful at it manage to treat victims as faceless cyphers, but not necessarily because they are heartless. He wrote: Newspaper legends, created by entertainments like The Front Page, had promoted the fiction that police reporters were ruthlessly cynical about human misery. The fact was quite different. We affected the cynical style and turned grisly events into tasteless jokes because that was a way to maintain our emotional detachment, and staying emotionally detached from what you were seeing was a way of saving your life. So why would anyone go into this business? Some journalism big-thinkers worry that the profession no longer attracts the best and the brightest. Is it any wonder? A generation ago, Walter Cronkite and Anthony Lewis were role models. I dont sense a clamor in high schools today among students who wish to be the next Connie Chung or Bill OReilly. Although I came of age during the Watergate era, I was not one of those attracted to journalism by Woodward-and-Bernstein fever. I was drawn to the profession while watching television one night in the early 1970s in my hometown of Omaha. The late, late show featured a cheesy drama from 1933 called Picture Snatcher. Cagney starred as Danny Kean, an ex-convict in New York who is turned away from one job prospect after another because of his bad-guy background. He finally stumbles into a place so low in the social pit that his rap sheet doesnt matter: a newspaper office. The Cagney character is hired as a picture snatcher. His job is to get inside the home of a murder victim or a dead hero cop by any means necessary, even if that meant posing as a life insurance agent or priest. While the grieving widow is distracted making coffee or fetching a document, the picture snatcher grabs photographs of the dearly departed off the walls and bureaus so they can be plastered in the next days paper. I was delighted. I thought that perhaps I, too, could make it as a newsman. I hope that, 30 years later, I bring a bit more seriousness to my consideration of what we do and why we do it. I know that I am more fascinated than ever about humankinds enduring fascination with crime and personal indiscretion. A crime reporter from Cleveland offered a common sense answer a few years ago when I asked him why he supposed crime stories were so popular. He replied, Because
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people like to read them. Crime news has an enduring appeal. It provides readers and viewers with interesting stories--some sexy, some titillating, some engaging, some important. And news-consumers eat them up, often while complaining about the nature of such stories. But why? Linda Heath, a psychologist, analyzed crime content in 36 newspapers and assessed attitudes about crime in interviews with readers. She concluded readers devour crime for something more than titillation. She wrote: The more newspapers print articles about criminals in other places running amok, picking victims at random, and trampling social norms, the more secure readers feel in their own environments. In essence, readers like the grass to be browner on the other side of the fence, and the browner the better. One mystery of journalismto those both inside and out of the business-- is the process by which a particular grass-is-browner story is plucked out of the sea of everyday crime in America and plopped onto the front pages. Melvin Mencher, a retired Columbia University journalism professor and textbook author, calls this selection the heart of journalistic practice. He writes, In their reporting and editing, journalists are always making choices: what to report, whom to interview, what to put in the story, what to leave out. Selectionis guided by values that reflect prevailing concerns and the value system of society and the individual. The issue of selection is an evergreen topic on the electronic discussion list of Criminal Justice Journalists, a national association of crime reporters and editors. As one newspaper reporter put it recently, How do you justify to your readers the amount of coverage a murder victim receives? He described two murders: a white man who beat his sleeping, pregnant wife to death with a metal bat, and a black man stabbed to death during a drug deal. The first got 40 inches, the second 5. The reporter asked, Are we obligated to report all murders equally, or at least try to? Should we pound the pavement when we know that the victim was a druggie who didn't pay his dealer on time? Or, as reporters, should we filter out the uninteresting, routine shootings, stabbings etc. to make room for the unique stories that surprise and shock us? Edna Buchanan made a career of finding the unusual in the seemingly routine. She argues in her memoir that there is no such thing as a dirtball murder. Every murder conceals a story. Jimmy Breslin, the longtime New York newspaper columnist, likes to say that reporting is climbing steps and knocking on doors. He earned his reputation as a young reporter by doing so at places where other journalists didnt bother. Inside those doors, he often found fabulous stories about routine cases. Should news be defined as the unusual? In crime, if the reason behind a statistical run-up lies in drug or gang murders, dont those cases deserve out attention? This is my key complaint about crime journalism. We reach too easily for the predictable celebrity crime stories. (The wall-to-wall news coverage of the picayune shoplifting case of second-tier actress Winona Ryder in the fall of 2002 was a recent example.) And we make crime celebrities out of people who don't deserve it, often based upon a sex angle. Evidence? Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco, players in an incidental felonious assault on Long Island, became international media figures because of the storys
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titillation value. Victim advocates complainwith good causethat criminals attain fame while their victims remain obscure. But even this is not news. Shakespeare commented on crime celebrity 400 years ago when he wrote, "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." Imagine the media applications of the case of Herostratus. The star-struck young man crept into the majestic Temple of Diana in Ephesus in 356 BC and set the place ablaze. The marble temple was a wonder of the ancient world, the finest of more than 30 shrines built in honor of Artemis, the revered Greek goddess known to the Romans as Diana. It was twice the size of the Parthenon and for two centuries drew tourists and pilgrims to Ephesus. That ended with the arson by Herostratus that brought down the temple. Far from trying to conceal his arson, Herostratus claimed credit. He hungered for fame and believed only a destructive act of such proportion would ensure that his name would go down in history. The authorities decreed a novel form of punishment: They tried to sentence the grandiose young man to a life of obscurity by threatening to execute anyone who spoke his name. The attempt at justice failed. The name Herostratus has endured in literature and has been adapted in the vocabulary of many languages. (In German, the noun Herostrat denotes a wanton seeker of fame.) The modern media conundrum of crime celebrity is familiar to us, even if the name Herostratus is not. Recent cases suggest journalists should pay heed to a crime culture in which fame and infamy have grown increasingly synonymous. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, seemed to be angling for legend status. The two boys who murdered classmates and a teacher in suburban Denver in 1999 before killing themselves left videotapes anticipating their own media immortality. The Unabomber was so keenly aware of his image that he made it known he wanted to be called Ted (not Theodore) Kuczynski. When someone commits a criminal act purely to attract celebrity, are journalists facilitators? On the other hand, how can we ignore the acts of some publicity-seekers? A mass killing is news. Bonnie Bucqueroux, coordinator of the Victims and the Media Program at Michigan State University, says the reading and viewing public has come to expect details about perpetrators. "The truth is that evil is a compelling thing to look at," she says. "The question is, how much do we pander to our curiosity, and to what extent do we want to show our children that this is a viable way for a person to garner attention, because we know from our kids that those who can't get attention through positive behavior will turn to negative behavior to get attention?" The question deserves newsroom consideration. Technology plays a role in several other journalism trends that should be of concern: Increasingly, crime reporters seem to rely upon electronic reporting methods rather than in-person visits to police stations and crime scenes. Nothing can replace climbing steps and knocking on doors, as Jimmy Breslin put it. The Internet increased the possibility of cluster crime reporting. (A cluster is a collection of anecdotal incidents presented--probably falsely--as a trend. It is akin
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to writing a story about a cancer epidemic based upon the spurious fact that six of eight obituaries in your local newspaper on a given day cite cancer as the cause of death.) A generation ago, reporters seeking to buttress a crime trend story might have to spend hours or days on the telephone gathering evidence. Today, a twoline posting on a journalism discussion site seeking comparable examples for a trend might bring a dozen responses from all corners of the nation--liquor store murders, for example. This overlooks the fact that a certain number of liquor store murders will happen every day in this nation of 285 million people. Thirdly, the Internet is having an impact on sourcing. On one hand, it is easier than ever for journalists to round out stories with national sourcing thanks to email, university web resources and sourcing innovations such as profnet. However, this has brought sameness to sourcing as the media across the country reach out to the war horse crime experts. Wouldnt a local or regional source on child molestation or cybercrime, someone with a grasp of context, be more appropriate in most cases?

The media is not responsible for crime, but it can provide the welcoming and inclusive nexus at which intelligent public discussion of crime, crime justice and crime policy can occur. Likewise, the media cannot tell the public what to think, but it can prompt the issues that we think about. I will close with three suggestions for my media colleagues: Take responsibility for your news content. Drop the chicken-egg question that blames readers or viewers for prurient tastes in content. They eat what we feed them. As newsman David Brinkley put it, News is what we say it is. News should inform, not inflame. Tell stories thoroughly, and make the important stories interesting. Defy convention and think beyond the media peer culture. Rabble-rouse against the consulting gurus responsible for making all broadcasts look and sound alike.

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THE MEDIA, THE PUBLIC, AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE POLICY Ray Surette*

o begin, first consider a question: Describe in your mind the person most likely to be your killer their approximate age, race, and gender. While youre drawing that image also consider the description of the next most likely person to be your killer. Have you got the images together? A substantial number of readers will have constructed an image of a minority inner-city teenager, perhaps a gang member or a white middle-aged serial killer. Both are of course dead wrong. I dont know the correct answers for each reader but the correct answers for me are as follows: Question 1 My most likely killer is a white, fifty-something male. Question 2 My second most likely killer is a white 40-something female.

In short, myself first and my wife second. I and nearly all readers are statistically more likely to commit suicide than to be murdered and if murdered, more likely to be killed by an intimate loved ones than by someone else. The question these admittedly trick tasks raise is: Why dont many of us come up with ourselves first and our loved ones second when asked about mortal danger? I contend that the mass media through their crime and justice content are the central reason for the answers that are frequently given. The publics perception of crime and justice reflect the medias influence on the construction of these perceptions and ultimately on criminal justice policy. The crime and justice content found in the media leads to a Predator Criminal Icon1 (currently personified by the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lector). The predator criminal icon, in turn, leads to public support for punitive criminal justice policies. Resultant policies are geared to address the worst-case predatory criminal scenarios that are media constructed and embraced by the general public. We ultimately base our policies not on our typical criminals but on our most atypical ones. This happens because for crime and justice the media are constantly saying, Look! Look over here! This is important!

Copyright 2003 Ray Surette, published here by permission. Correspondence should be addressed to author, University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida
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Often we wind up looking at things that are important only because everyone is looking at the trumpeted content. To understand the broader relationship of media and criminal justice policy, our first task is to look at the media content.

Content News, Entertainment and Infotainment In a traditional consideration of media content, news, entertainment, and advertising would be discussed as separate components. They now are more logically discussed together because of the recent expansion of a media content area that blurs the traditional boundaries between these three areas. This additional media component area is termed infotainment and its influence has caused the content of news and entertainment to become more and more similar over the past decade. It is especially important for the crime and justice content found in news and entertainment. Figure 1 shows the four contemporary media areas the traditionally separate areas of news and entertainment, the expanding realm of infotainment, and the overarching layer of advertising. In the past, a media consumer could easily identify whether a media product was an advertisement, a news segment, or an entertainment product.2 Due to the growth of infotainment media, however, this discrimination is no longer easy and the media abounds with content that is ambiguously formatted. Thus, in addition to the imbedded infotainment items that now pepper the mass media (for example the interviews of people promoting movies that appear during news programs) one also finds infotainmentcommercials where hour-long advertisements are disguised as talk shows or product test reports, infotainment-entertainment shows like COPS where heavily edited and scripted stories are presented as documentaries, and infotainment-news offerings such as Sixty Minutes and Americas Most Wanted where dramatized stories are disguised as in-depth news reports.

Figure 1. 40

Infotainment is important because it is the future of crime and justice media. In infotainment media the other three traditional media components are merged and blurred in a combination of news-like voyeurism, entertainment style escapism, and Madison Avenue motivated marketing. In execution, crime and justice infotainment content displays three characteristics:3 Serialization the presentation of content is within a series of short dramatic events and stories. Short-term episodes are preferred. Personification the focus is on emotional, dramatic, interpersonal human aspects of a story with heavy emphasis on developing personalities and in particular celebrities. Commodification the packaging, formatting, promoting, and selling of information about the world to a consumer audience dominates the media production process. Media consumers are perceived as a market and information about the world is conceived as a marketable good. The final result of the application of these characteristics and the infotainment process in the realm of crime and justice is the decontextualization of crime and justice knowledge. Events are covered with a reduced historical and social context. People know what happened, nobody knows why. Or more specifically, descriptions of crime are common; explanations of criminality are rare and simplistic. The contemporary drive toward infotainment also compliments two long standing crime and justice content laws. The first law is the law of opposites which states that whatever the reality of crime and justice is, the media emphasize the opposite.4 The law applies to the majority of the characteristics of criminal justice. As shown in Table 1, violent crime dominates the media, property crime dominates the real world; media offenders tend to be white middle-aged males, in society teenagers and minorities are more likely to be arrested; in the media-courts trials appear, in the real criminal justice system plea bargains are the rule. Table 1 Law of Opposites.5

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The second media content law is termed the front-end loaded law. To understand this law, think of the entire criminal justice process as running from the committing of a crime through to the termination of an offenders sentence. In their content, the media focus on the extreme front end of the process, from the planning and committing of a crime, through its discovery and investigation, to the crimes resolution (frequently via the violent and fatal apprehension of the offender). Law enforcement activities are thereby concentrated on within the media. The further into the system you look, the less media content you find. What the police do is depicted the most, courts less, corrections nil. Together the infotainment focus and the two media content laws lead to the predator criminal icon being the most commonly found crime and justice image in the mass media.6 The predatory criminal icon fulfills the front-end focus, the backwards law, and fits well into the infotainment products that more and more dominate the media landscape. The predatory criminal icon also incorporates a portrait of criminals as animalistic, incorrigible and innately evil. Being animalistic, predatory criminals are separated from humanity by the media. They are constructed as a separate species that may look like us but are not the same as the law-abiding. This characteristic trisects society into predators, prey, and protectors.7 Combined with the second characteristic of incorrigible the media paint criminals as irredeemable rabid dogs, they emerge as predatory animals that cannot be domesticated and for which rehabilitation is not a possibility. Wolves cannot be made house pets. The third characteristic of innately evil portrays crime as the result of forces and causes beyond societys control and influence. Crime is not a social problem but an act of biology. Collectively these characteristics show predatory crime as the equivalent of a lighting strike an unavoidable violent act of nature. This predator criminal icon is not only highlighted in infotainment media but is common in the general entertainment and news content as well. This icon is best represented as real to the consuming public within the media-preferred vehicle of a mediated, comodified criminal investigation and judicial case termed a media trial.8 Media trials are high profile, intensely covered criminal investigations and judicial proceedings in which the criminal justice system is presented in infotainment styled miniseries. Because media trials are inherently infotainment, the news media utilize infotainment criteria to frame their coverage of crime and justice. Referring back to the components of infotainment- serialization, personification, and commodification, the based-on-a-real-case media trial is the perfect crime and justice infotainment show. Production costs are underwritten by taxpayers with sets, actors, and scripts supplied by the judicial system. Media trials are also highly popular. If considered solely as a television program, the O.J. trial, for example, is one of the higher rated programs of the 1990s.9 Not surprisingly, media trials are regularly promoted and are not the once in a lifetime event they are marketed as. nd Identified by the press 10 as the Trial of the Century, the O.J. Simpson trial was the 32 trial so labeled last century. Media trials come in three basic flavors. 11 Flavor one is the Sinful Rich type in which the predatory and often salacious activities of the well-to-do are exploited. Evil Stranger trials comprise flavor two where psychotic killers or various groups of non-Americans prey on innocents. The third flavor is the Abuse of Power trial in which individuals in positions of trust and authority use their positions for personal gain. Political scandals and especially corrupt police are mainstays of this group. Collectively, all three flavors have long media histories from Beowulf through Shakespeare to contemporary serial killer films. They remain popular current storylines for entertainment portraits of crime and justice. All incorporate elements of predatory criminality, be it moneyed, violent, or political. In the end, learning about criminal justice from the media and in particular from the media trials is analogous to learning geology solely from watching volcano eruptions.12 You will surely be entertained but 42

you wont learn anything about the typical processes of plea negotiations or unsuccessful investigations in criminal justice or plate tectonics or subduction zones in geology. What you get from the media regarding crime and justice is an immense amount of minutiae about rare events. Social Constructionism With the typical crime and justice media content dominated by infotainment considerations, predator criminal icons, and media trials, the next issue is why the content is important. Why should there be any concerns about content that is so obviously distorted? The theoretical perspective that best addresses this question is Social Constructionism which if it had a slogan would be Reality is a collective hunch.13 The social impact of the medias content is through the mechanics of social constructionism.14 The content comes to be important to the extent that we use it to construct each others reality. EdithAnn note that this picture is similar to a news media copter shot. It adds no useful information but does provide a nice visual. The engines of social constructionism and their relationship to one another are shown in Figure 2. It displays the role that the mass media content plays in constructing individuals ideas about reality. As shown, personal experience and conversational reality (unmediated information one receives directly from other people peers, family members, significant others) is a powerful non-media source of information. This non-media knowledge is however limited in quantity. Only a relatively small number of events are going to directly happen to each individual and to individuals they have direct contact with. Therefore, information from the popular culture via the mass media while less powerful per individual information item is much more massive and for many areas of reality overwhelms the information received through personal experience and conversational reality. Not only do you receive more information from these mediated sources but they also influence the information passed along to you in conversation and impact the direct experiences you seek out (for example mass media promotions influence whether you go to a rock concert or an opera). It should also be noted that social institutions and organizations such as governments have limited avenues to directly influence individuals in the social construction process. In large industrialized societies such as the United States, institutions and organizations must for the most part disseminate their information through the mass media. Thus, if the president wants people to accept as their reality that the economy is in good shape he must market this construction through the media. The final socially constructed reality what each person believes the world to be truly like - for each individual is the result of the mixing of information from all sources. From this blended information a working model of the world is constructed. For reality areas where people have limited non-media sources of information like crime and justice, the mass media become more important in determining what the final socially constructed reality looks like. 43

Figure 2 The Engines of Social Construction

Social Institutions and Organizations Personal Experience and Conversational Reality Socially Constructed Reality

Popular Culture and Mass Media

Enhancing the medias central role in this process and very important for the social construction of crime and justice reality are symbolic crimes. A symbolic crime is a crime that crystallizes a particular crime and justice social construction. They usually emphasize the worst, most heinous types of crimes and the most innocent victims. If you have a social construction of crime and justice that you want to be accepted by the rest of society, a symbolic crime is invaluable. Through the process of social constructionism the impact of symbolic crimes, especially when combined with a media trial, is immense. An indication of this impact is suggested by polls that indicate that more people can identify the little girl in the accompanying photo than the man.15

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Due to its dramatic video, one of the most well-known symbolic crimes and accompanying media trial is that of the Rodney King arrest by the LAPD. The King incident additionally shows the competition between differing constructions inherent in the social construction process. As the Rodney King media trial developed, three competing constructions of the Rodney King beating vied for public dominance.16 In the first construction, King resisted arrest and the beating was justified by Kings prior actions. If the public had accepted this construction, the implications for law enforcement policy would have been minimal. As the police are seen as justified, the police officers were not seen as acting inappropriately. In the second competing construction, the beating was unjustified but was an isolated incident of unwarranted police violence carried out by a few renegade police officers. The officers were not acting appropriately but were also not typical or representative of L.A. police officers. This construction implies the policy response of firing the bad apples and reprimanding the officers involved in misrepresenting the incident. Targeted internal individual discipline is all that is required. However in the third construction, the beating is unjustified and seen as an example of an endemic problem of unwarranted and consistent police violence toward minorities. The officers involved acted as many L.A. officers would have and the beating reflects an organizational tolerance of excessive violence toward minorities. The policy changes required from this construction involve drastic change in the implied L.A. police culture and the revamping of the top administration. In the end, the third construction won the competition and became the dominant one with the public. The L.A. police chief was fired and a new African American chief was hired. The Rodney King beating displays how even for events in which factual information is not disputed, vigorous competition among constructed interpretations of those facts can occur and how the resolution of construction competitions can result in widely different criminal justice policies. In sum, social constructionism directs how mass media content gets translated into social reality. Thus, even though the crime and justice content is backwards, distorted, and myopic, its predominance in news, entertainment, and infotainment leads to attentive individuals constructing their realities regarding crime and justice policies along predictable media influenced dimensions. A brief review of the relevant research reveals to what extent this expectation is borne out. Media and Criminal Justice Policy There are three social research areas that are important to a media and criminal justice policy discussion. They are research on the medias effect on the rank of crime on the public agenda, the medias effect on public attitudes and beliefs toward crime and justice, and the medias effect on the formation of criminal justice public policies. In the first area, effects on the public agenda, the research has looked for a correspondence between media attention to crime and crimes place on the publics agenda-their list of public problems.17 The issue is whether the media pushes crime up the list of social concerns by influencing what people think about, rather than what they think. The research has found a rough correspondence between how much attention the media pay to crime and where the public ranks crime as a social problem. This has resulted in paradoxical historical situations where crime in society is falling but concern about crime in the public is simultaneously rising.18 The second research area has conceptualized around the idea of mean world views characterized by suspicion, fear, alienation, distrust, cynicism, and a belief that society is a violent, crime-ridden, dangerous place.19 As with agenda setting, the research has found a haphazard correlation between media consumption and the holding of these world views. Together agenda setting and belief and attitude effects lead to a social 45

reality of crime and justice that supports punitive criminal justice policies the third research area.20 Therein, research has shown an association between media consumption and support for criminalizing more behaviors and increasing the punishments for behaviors already crimes. Overall, however, the research results for all three research streams are mixed. There is certainly a connection between the media and criminal justice policy but the connection is irregular and not particularly predictable. The reason that the media and criminal justice policy relationship is confusing is that when you look at the media and criminal justice policy you find different relational models operating in different jurisdictions. There are, unfortunately, no universals. The most commonly thought of model is the direct linear model in which media are seen to influence the public, who in turn pressure criminal justice policy makers to create new policy.21 Figure 3. Direct Media Influence Model Event Media Coverage Criminal Justice Policy A confounding false-media influence model is displayed in Figure 4. Opposite to a direct influence model, in this case the media appears to be affecting criminal justice policy but in reality are not. Because the coverage of an event is usually instantaneous and policy change is lagging, it looks like the coverage has caused the policy change. You have the proper temporal order for a causal relationship, just not a true causal effect. You can also have situations as reflected in Figure 5 in which the after-effects of an event and the media coverage of the event both influence criminal justice policy.

Figure 4. Apparent but No Media Influence Model

Event

Media Coverage

Criminal Justice Policy

In sum, linear direct media influence on criminal justice policy is rare, idiosyncratic multi-directional effects are more common, and effects when they occur are hard to discern. For example, invisible effects are also possible such as anticipatory suppressive effects where potential coverage causes a policy to be shelved due to the fear of negative publicity. Regarding the public, they play a haphazard role in the formation

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of criminal justice policy. The research suggests that personal histories in each criminal justice jurisdiction are key. The prior personal relationships between criminal justice policy makers and local media personnel are the most important for determining the magnitude and nature of the medias effect on criminal justice policy.22

Figure 5. Simultaneous Media Influence Model

Event

Media Coverage

Criminal Justice Policy

Conclusion: News from Nowhere, Policy to Follow. The phase, news from nowhere, policy to follow, reflects where we currently are regarding media and criminal justice policy. The media has developed a wonderful technological ability to rapidly provide news and images of events from all over the world, often in live, real-time portraits. This has resulted in a bombardment of decontextualized news. Our factual knowledge of the world has increased; our understanding has not. The reasons for this paradoxical state are firstly technological. The technological advances that have provided live coverage from anywhere on the planet have also resulted in the development of entirely new mediums. We have faster access to more raw knowledge through more avenues. We live 23 in a multi-media web that has resulted in the common practice of media content looping. As mediums have multiplied, content has become more fluid and the deconstruction of events from their actual social, political, and historical locations and reconstruction of events into new media-created locations has increased. The continuous deconstruction and reconstruction of events results in the content looping where real events migrate to entertainment media and fictional events are seen as real by the public. The sinking of the Titanic becomes the stage for a fictional love-story, Forrest Gump is believed to have really attended the University of Alabama. The constant recycling of infotainment media knowledge throughout the multi-media web has moved society into the Age of Media Looping. The development of this new age corresponds with cultural shifts from a print dominated culture through an electronic culture to a current pixel infotainment media culture.24 The print and the electronic media cultures are rooted in real events. The contemporary pixel culture is rooted in media loops and a confusion of factual and fictional knowledge. Each media cultural stage has a unique relationship to criminal justice policy. In the print culture (circa 1830s to 1950s) you find lagged, linear policy. An event occurs, it has to be translated into written descriptions which must be printed and disseminated, reviews and discussions accompany and follow the descriptions, and after a period of consideration policy is forwarded, debated, and finalized. In the electronic culture, (circa 1920s to 1990s) however, the time span from event to policy is collapsed as the presentation of live, emotionally-laden media content comes to dominate. 47

Beginning with live radio coverage of events like the Hindenberg crash and with the advent of television supplanting the print culture, electronic culture moved visual content over written content. For the first time experiencing an event through the media took precedence over understanding an event. Explanations and contexualization was reduced to whatever would fit into visual accompanying sound bytes. The current media pixel culture has further devolved into visual bytes that demand instant response. The pixel culture involves events that might not be real and evokes reactions that cry out for immediate policies. The Rodney King beating marks the beginning of this era as its brief, soundless video supplies its impact free of any narrative. If current trends continue and the print media continues to decline in cultural importance a return to a pre-print like society is possible were only the few and elite actually read, the majority of people finding little need or inclination. Applying these ideas to the current state of criminal justice policy formation we find a pixel policy formation dominated by infotainment content and media looping. Within this pixel culture we find crime socially constructed as a technological engineering problem rather than as a social problem. Not surprisingly, we believe that we can solve our problems via equipment, manpower, and money. Like highway congestion we feel that we can out-build the problem if we throw enough technology, funding, and personnel at it. In a media loop, society is also infotained by the crime battle. Television shows based on video footage from the metastasizing systems of public CCTV surveillance camera systems is a prime example of these infotainment applications.25 How might the media and criminal justice policy relationship be improved? Sports news provides a good model. Sports coverage contains information about the big event (the big game, crime, or trial) but unlike most crime and justice content it also provides accompanying context, opinion, commentary, history, statistics, analysis, and predictions. Unlike crime and justice, for sports viewers, readers, and listeners get a sense of understanding of the big events- what happened, why it happened, and most importantly what it portends. They learn not only the score but why the game was important, why someone lost, and opinions about what might be done to prevent future loss. A unique aspect of sports coverage is that a final answer is not expected by the consumer and different possible courses of corrective action are openly debated. Should we trade someone, run the ball more, change the overall philosophy of the team, and other policy choices are all regularly debated in sports news. Sports fans are encouraged to consider competing policy choices, to choose and argue their positions, and to consider the implications of their choices. If only crime and justice media content and subsequent policy formation came close to this process. It doesnt because it is more expensive and time consuming for the media to routinely produce this sort of in-depth contextual type of coverage. The media can produce this sort of crime and justice content but they will not do so without a market demand. Thus, the public ultimately gets the crime and justice coverage they are willing to accept.

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Contextual sports news sells papers, attracts viewers, and makes a profit. Contextual crime and justice news does not. This basic fact puts a barrier on the extent that the media will invest in moving from pixel to contextual content. In the current culture, significant improvements are not likely. Still, it has been shown that context can be added without decreasing the attractiveness of news stories by using a public health style perspective to format stories on violence.26 It remains to be seen if there will be enough market demand in the future to support a substantial permanent shift in crime and justice media content.

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Endnotes
1

Ray Surette, Predator Criminals as Media Icons 131-158 in Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime: Studies in Newsmaking Criminology. (Gregg Barak ed., Garland Publishing) (1994). 2 Ray Surette and Charles Otto, A Test of a Crime and Justice Infotainment Measure, 30 The Journal of Criminal Justice, 443-453 (2002). 3 Richard Fox and Robert Van Sickel, Tabloid Justice 27 Lynne Rienner Pub (2001). 4 Ray Surette Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice: Images and Realities, West/Wadsworth (1998). 5 Table 1 Source: Table 3: Serious Crimes on 1981 TV Entertainment Programs Compared to 1980 Reports. (%), 16 in Linda S. Lichter and S. Robert Lichter, Prime Time Crime: Criminals and Law Enforcers in TV Entertainment, The Media Institute, (1983). 6 Predator Criminals as Media Icons in Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime: Studies in Newsmaking Criminology. Gregg Barak editor (1994) Garland Publishing. 7 Ray Surette, Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice : Images and Realities 49. 8 Ray Surette, Media Trials, 17 The Journal of Criminal Justice 293-308 (1989). 9 Richard Fox and Robert Van Sickel Tabloid Justice 104-107. 10 Elizabeth Wasserman, No Big Deal: O.J. Just another Trial of the Century, Miami Herald , June 18, 1995, at 1A,10A. 11 Ray Surette Media Trials 17 The Journal of Criminal Justice, 293-308 (1989). 12 Ibid. at 299. 13 Quote attributed to Lily Tomlin playing her character of an eight year old girl, EdithAnn. 14 For general overviews of social constructionism and applications to crime and justice see Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse Constructing Social Problems Aldine de Gruyter, (1987); Kenneth Gergen An Invitation to Social Construction, Sage, (1999); Gary Potter and Victor Kappeler Constructing Crime, Waveland Press (1998); and Philip Jenkins Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide, Aldine de Gruyter, (1994). 15 Jon Benet Ramsey and Vice President Dick Chaney. Richard Fox and Robert Van Sickel citing data compiled by the Pew Research Center, 1991-1999, Tabloid Justice, 2 citing data compiled by the Pew Research Center, 1991-1999. 16 Ray Surette, Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice: Images and Realities, 12-13. 17 R. Entman, How the Media Affect What People Think: An Information Processing Approach, 51 Journal of Politics, 347-370 (1989); J. Doppelt and P. Manikas, Mass Media and Criminal Justice Decision Making 129-142 in The Media and Criminal Justice Policy (Ray Surette ed., Thomas Pub.) (1990); D. Lasorsa and W. Wanta Effects of Personal, Interpersonal and Media Experiences on Issue Saliences, 67 Journalism Quarterly 804-813 (1990); M. Mackuen, Exposure to Information, Belief Integration, and Individual Responsiveness to Agenda Change, 78 American Political Science Review, 372-391 (1984); B Page, R. Shapiro, and G. Dempsey, What Movies Public Opinion? 81 American Political Science Review, 479-491 (1987); D. Protess D, Leff, S Brooks and M. Gordon Uncovering Rape: The Watchdog Press and the Limits of Agenda Setting, 49 Public Opinion Quarterly, 19-37 (1985). 18 R. A. Manan, Fear of Crime Grows as Crime Rate Falls, Boston Globe, August 15, 2002 at 1A. 19 J. Carlson, Prime Time Law Enforcement , Praeger (1985); G. Gerbner and L. Gross Living with television: The Violence Profile, 26 Journal of Communication, 173-199 (1976); Ted Chiricos, Sarah Eschholz, and Marc Gertz, News and Fear of Crime: Toward an Identification of Audience Effects, (August, 1996) (revised unpublished paper originally presented at the American Society of Criminology, Boston, Mass, November 15, 1995); G. Gerbner, L. Gross, M. Morgan, and N. Signorielli, The Mainstreaming of America: Violence Profile No. 11, 30 Journal of Communications, 10-29 (1980).

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20

D. Pritchard, The News Media and Public Policy Agendas 103-112 in Public Opinion, The Press and Public Policy (David Kennamer ed., Praeger) (1992); D. Protess, F. Cook, J. Doppelt, J. Ettema, M. Gordon, D. Leff and P. Miller, The Journalism of Outrage: Investigative Reporting and Agenda Building in America, Guilford (1991); P. Schlesinger, H. Tumber, and G. Murdock, The Media Politics of Crime and Criminal Justice, 42 British Journal of Sociology, 397-420, (1991); Ray Surette, Television Viewing and Support of Punitive Criminal Justice Policy, 62 Journalism Quarterly, 373-377, 450, (1985). 21 The three models presented in Figures 3,4 and 5 are first discussed in Ray Surette, Methodological Problems in Determining Media Effects on Criminal Justice: A Review and Suggestions for the Future, 6 Criminal Justice Policy Review, 291-310 (1992). 22 See D. Pritchard, The News Media and Public Policy Agenda, (1992) and D. Protess F. Cook, J. Doppelt, J. Ettema, M. Gordon, D. Leff and P. Miller, The Journalism of Outrage: Investigative Reporting and Agenda Building in America, (1991) for examples. 23 Peter Manning, Media Loops , 25 39 in Popular Culture, Crime & Justice (Frankie Bailey and Donna Hale eds.West/Wadsworth) (1998). 24 For a discussion of the shift from a print to electronic media culture see Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place, Oxford Univ. Press, (1985). 25 Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV , Berg Publisher, (1999) 26 Shelly Rogers and Esther Thorson, The Reporting of Crime and Violence in the Los Angeles Times: Is There a Public Health perspective? 6 Journal of Health Communication, 169-182 (2001) and The Reporting on Violence Project, Media Studies Group, Berkeley, CA., (2002).

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REPORTING CRIME AND VIOLENCE FROM A PUBLIC HEALTH PERSPECTIVE Esther Thorson, Missouri Journalism Lori Dorfman, Berkeley Media Studies Group Jane Stevens, Berkeley Journalism*

rime and violence has been a significant component of news coverage since the earliest newspapers (Dorfman & Thorson, 1998). This coverage is primarily framed in either a law enforcement or criminal justice point of view (Stevens, 1998). Beyond these basic frames, however, modern analyses of crime and violence news reveal significant violations of principles of quality coverage. Even more disturbing, there is growing evidence that the problems in news coverage of crime and violence do significant damage to news consumers, who rely on this information for their perceptions and responses to the role of crime in their communities. This paper will overview the critiques of crime and violence reporting, and then suggest that amelioration could come from changing the coverage to include more of what has been called the public health model of news (e.g., Coleman & Thorson, 2002; Dorfman, Thorson, & Stevens, 2001; Rodgers & Thorson, 2001). The central feature of public health reporting is that death and injury are seen as preventable rather than inevitable. Until the 1980s, crime and violence were largely outside the purview of public health (Winett, 1998). But in 1985, U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop declared that violence was as much a public health issue for todays physicians as smallpox was for the medical community in previous generations. The Centers for Disease Control initiated a program on violence prevention in 1991, which later became the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. Since then, many state and city public health departments have established offices of violence prevention. Approaching violence as a public health issue means applying the same tools as those used to reduce and control other epidemics: studying the interaction among the victim, the agent of injury or death, and the environment; defining risk factors, and developing methods to prevent injury or death. For more than 15 years, epidemiologists have been identifying violence risk factors, including the availability of firearms and alcohol, racial discrimination, unemployment, violence in the media, lack of education, abuse as a child, witnessing violent acts in the home or neighborhood, isolation of the nuclear family, and belief in male dominance over females (Winett, 1998). Unfortunately, however, journalists have not shared this change in thinking about crime and violence. We argue here that journalistic adoption of the viewpoint that crime and violence are issues of public health would significantly improve both how this news is constructed, and that in turn would lead to improvement of the publics concepts of how the epidemic of crime and violence should best be handled so that society becomes healthier.

Copyright 2003 Esther Thorson, Lori Dorfman & Jane Stevens, published here by permission. Correspondence should be addressed to first author, School of Journalism, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri.
*

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In this paper, we will provide specific examples of what public health-based coverage of crime and violence would ideally look like and what we expect the impact on news consumers to be. Our aim is to diffuse this perspective on crime and violence news into the everyday news business. We will describe our efforts to make this happen, and our results to date. The Look of News About Crime and Violence Many researchers argue that news about crime and violence is degraded and misrepresentative to a disturbing and unacceptable degree. David Krajicek (1998), for example, subtitles his critique of crime and violence news Media Miss Real Story On Crime While Chasing Sex, Sleaze And Celebrities. There is no doubt that a significant portion of both print and television news focuses on crime, and this has been true for a long time (e.g., see Stempel, 1962; Jerin & Fields, 1993; Dorfman & Schiraldi, 2001). But as research has started to focus on news content and its problems, crime news has come under more and more critique. There are five main aspects of this critique. (1) Crime news misrepresents the relative frequency of various types of crime (e.g., Davis, 1951; Jones, 1976; Dominick, 1978; Garofalo, 1981; Fedler & Jordan, 1982; Winhauser et al., 1990; Jerin & Fields, 1994; Barlow, Barlow & Chiricos, 1995). Dorfman, Thorson, & Stevens (2001) report that 80% of local murders were reported in the LA Times, but only 2% of assaults and sexual assaults were reported. Miller (1998) reported that a content analysis of TV newscasts in Baltimore showed that 38% of the broadcasts concerned crime. In contrast, local government or politics composed only 8% of coverage, education 4%, 4% on health, and only 1% on business. (2) Crime news exaggerates and sensationalizes violence (Reid, 1971, Howitt & Cumberbatch, 1975, Halloran, 1978; Graber, 1980; Singer, 1983). Barlow et al. (1995) reported that in a content analysis of Time magazine stories, 73% of 144 articles focused on violent crime, although only 10% of crimes known to the police at that time involved violence. This study also pointed out that although most crime involves the acquisition of property, violent crime dominates media portrayals. (3) Crime news ignores causal and contextual processes producing crime patterns (Isaacs, 1961; Dominick, 1978; Halloran, 1978; Stevens, 1997). Barlow, Barlow, & Chiricos (1995) also point out that there is little attention to the causal relationship between economics and crime, particularly the fact that unemployment and crime are highly associated, but a connection is seldom noted in news stories. These authors also report that of the Time articles they looked at, 82% were about crime and criminals but only 17% were about criminal justice. Though a large proportion of crimes is committed under the influence of alcohol, this risk factor is seldom linked to violence in news coverage (Dorfman & Wallack 1998, Stevens, 1997). (4) Crime news fosters stereotypes by over- or under-representing certain ethnicities, gender and age of victims and perpetrators (Halloran, 1978; Barlow, Barlow & Chiricos, 1995; Williams & Dickenson, 1993; Farkas and Duffett, 1998; Miller, 1998, and Sorenson, Peterson, & Berk, 1998). Johnstone, Hawkins, & Michener (1994) report that, overall, fewer than a third of the homicides committed in Chicago in 1987 were reported in either of the metropolitan daily papers, and the homicides that were reported were more likely to involve multiple victims and less likely to include homicides where the victims were AfricanAmerican or Hispanic. Sorenson et al. (1998) analyzed all Los Angeles Times stories about homicides occurring between 1990 to 1994 and found that homicides of women, children, the elderly, multiple victims, those with suspects who were strangers to victims, and those that occurred in wealthier neighborhoods were more

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likely to be reported than homicides of African Americans, Latinos, the less educated, and those involving a weapon other than a firearm, or when the suspect was an intimate of the victim. And finally, Miller (1998) reported that in local television crime reporting in Baltimore, coverage of local crimes was melodramatic, with anguished interviews and gruesome facts, but devoid of any information that would provide understanding of causes or frequency of particular kinds of crime. (5) Crime news unfairly or inappropriately frames crime stories (Weimann & Gabor, 1987). Miller (1998) characterized the framing of crime in terms of its arbitrariness, randomness and insanity, committed by wandering demons. Miller also characterized most of the crime coverage as framed in terms of anti-urban propaganda, that is, emphasizing crime in metropolitan Baltimore and de-emphasizing crime in the suburbs. Weimann & Gabor (1987) reported that in Canadian daily newspapers, there was a blame frame involved in much of the crime reporting. In fact, in 25% of the stories, the victims contribution to the offense was noted. The blame frame was more likely when the victim was female, the perpetrator a male, and the offense violent. Gilliam, Iyengar, Simon, & Wright (1996) showed that crime is often framed as associated with minority status, and that this framing causes viewers and readers to perceive certain minority or youthful groups as super-predators. Negative impacts of crime reporting on the electorate It is clear then, even from this brief overview, that crime news often fails to represent the occurrence of crime and violence appropriately. But what, if anything, is the impact of this pattern of news on those who consume it and rely on it for their picture of the world? Surettes excellent book, Media, Crime and Criminal Justice (1998) discusses in great detail what is known about how crime and violence coverage in the American media affect news consumers. That volume explores theory about how this impact occurs. Summarizing this area only briefly here, we will suggest that the research literature provides support for negative consumer impacts that can be classified into four categories: peoples overestimation of the frequency of different classes of crime and violence; unwarranted increase in fear levels, failure to register the fact that crime has decreased in the past few years, and encouragement of support of punitive and discouragement of support of preventive crime policies. We look briefly at each of these effects. Crime and violence coverage leads to mistaken estimates of crime and violence frequency. OKeefe (1984), for example, showed that television crime news exposure was directly related to perceptions of the probability of violent crime. McLeod, Daily, Guo, Eveland & Bayer (1994) showed that attention to crime news (both television and newspaper) was related to perceived salience of crime. McLeod et al. (1996) showed that local television news, but not national network news, was strongly related to perceptions of crime both in ones city and ones own neighborhood. It was also related to the belief that crime was increasing in the city. In terms of fear responses, Warr (1993) reported from the National Opinion Research Centers General Social Survey that 55% of respondents indicated that being a victim of crime was something they personally worry about. Farkas and Duffett (1998) and Miller (1998) reported evidence from a phone survey in Baltimore that 84% of respondents said they worried that they or someone they care about will become a victim of crime. 36% of former Baltimore City residents who left the city said they did so at least partly because of the crime problem, and 54% said they had seriously considered leaving at least partly because of crime. In spite of these high levels of concern about 55

crime, only 7% indicated they had been a victim of a violent crime and only 26% said they had had property stolen. Also in terms of people failing to register that crime levels have declined, even though crime actually declined in Baltimore during the 1990s, the Farkas and Duffett (1998) study showed that only 13% of the respondents believed there was less crime in Baltimore City over the past year, while 80% said crime had either increased or remained the same. McLeod et al. (1995) found the same general pattern for Madison, Wisconsin. And finally, crime news has been demonstrated to have impact on support for punitive as opposed to preventive measures of dealing with crime. McLeod et al. (1996) reported that the more exposure and attention people had to crime news, the more they supported punitive measures. Antecol & Thorson (1999) showed that exposure and attention to crime news led both to greater support for punitive measures and less support for preventive measures. Thus it is well-supported that the way crime news is structured has crucial impact on audiences. It seems reasonable, then, to ask what crime news would include if it were to provide information for people to use in understanding crime and violence from a richer point of view, one that emphasizes prevention rather than inevitable and often sensationalistically represented occurrences. A Public Health Frame for Crime and Violence News As noted above, crime and violence are now treated by public health specialists as posing the same threat to the public as an epidemic. Stevens (1998) has elaborated on what this view of violence means for the reporting of crime and violence. She suggests that first, violent incidents should not be represented as isolated or random. Violent events have causal patterns, and only when those causes are discussed can people understand the pattern that is the true face of violence. Also, violence has consequences--for families of both perpetrators and victims, everything from economic effects to psychological ones. Consequences also occur at the community level in terms of need for medical treatment, rehabilitation, incarceration, trial, welfare, reduction in property values, and attitudes and beliefs of residents about their own community (e.g., Miller, 1998). Stevens suggests that crime and violence news should regularly provide: (1) information about the status of different types of violence in a community; (2) information about the economic and psychological consequences of different types of violence; (3) information that puts violent incidents into context about what is usual and can be prevented, and what is unusual and cannot be prevented; (4) information about methods being developed to prevent violence and how successful they are; and (5) information about whether peoples communities are implementing these approaches. Public health researchers also note that certain kinds of violence are extremely common but because they are not reported, they remain invisible to the public, who then underestimates how much of a problem they are. For example, domestic violence is one of the most common ways in which women suffer violence, but it seldom appears as news. Child abuse is the most common cause of violence and death to children, but usually takes a back seat to the reporting of such events as school shootings and kidnappings, which are far less common.

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How to change the reporting of crime and violence toward the public health model If violence reporting is to include a public health perspective, then journalists themselves must believe this is worthwhile, appropriate and practical. We have been engaged in a long-term effort to present this perspective to newspaper journalists and engage them in an exploration of their own crime reporting. This process has involved five important activities. First, we needed to create reporter-friendly materials that would explain the idea of public health-based reporting on crime and violence, show its feasibility, link reporters to sources that understood the public health perspective, and provide examples. Second, we had to show reporters and editors the shortcomings in crime reporting at their own newspapers. Third, we needed to provide training sessions on how a newspaper could innovate with its crime and violence reporting. Fourth, we needed to start studying the impact of the new forms of public health-based crime reporting. Fifth, we needed to teach reporting students how to think about crime and violence in this way from the very beginnings of their journalistic education. Although this work is continuing, we overview briefly each of these activities and what their impact has been so far. To begin the change process we knew we had to ask ourselves whether reporters could be expected to do public health-based reporting in the environment of fast-breaking news. We have had to ask whether there was room in the news hole for this more thoughtful and contextualized reporting. Reporting on Violence: A Handbook for Journalists To examine the first two questions, we (Stevens, 1997) created a handbook of crime and violence reporting that discussed how real reporters could incorporate public health reporting into what they did. It also provided examples of how the problem of space in the news hole could be accommodated. Reporters needed concrete examples of mechanisms for providing information about: 1) the incidence and prevalence of different types of violence in their community; 2) the economic and psychological consequences of different types of violence for individual victims and perpetrators as well as their families and neighborhoods; 3) the risk factors for violence; and 4) methods being developed to prevent violence, how successful they are, and whether the community was implementing them. The Handbook provided this information to editors and reporters. (See http://www.bmsg.org/content/58.php. for the online version of the handbook. Also note that there is now a second Handbook that extends the public health based reporting concept to television and internet news. It is available at the same URL.). The goal of the original Handbook was to gather in one easily accessible place, the data, sources, perspective, and examples reporters would need in order to include a public health perspective in crime and violence reporting. We also wanted to ensure that the vast amount of statistical information on violence would be presented clearly and that the book would be easy to use. The main problem was finding a way to be comprehensive yet concise. This was particularly important because reporters are not likely to use a tome.

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The Handbook presents the argument for including a public health perspective in violence reporting. It suggests new questions to ask when reporting on incidents of crime and violence that will link events to their context, consequences, risk factors and violence prevention resources; demonstrates the new perspective in Before and After news articles rewritten to include a public health perspective; identifies emerging issues in violence epidemiology; includes basic data on assaultive violence, family violence, violence among youth and the costs of violence; illustrates prevention approaches in four case studies; provides resources for data, research and prevention advocates; and concludes with a section on how to interpret research on crime and violence. The next step was to demonstrate the problematic pattern of crime and violence reporting in real newspapers to the reporters and editors. This meant we needed to complete detailed content analyses of newspapers and report the results back to those papers. An example of this analysis can be found in Rodgers & Thorson (2001), who analyzed the patterns of crime and violence coverage in one of Americas great newspapers, the Los Angeles Times. Rodgers and Thorson found that the newspapers coverage of crime treated the stories as episodes, i.e., isolated events, rather than as components of a pattern with causes and consequences. Crime events in the Los Angeles Times made up 39% of the total news hole, greater than stories about court occurrences (31% of the total), crime issues (16%), law enforcement (8%), and all other aspects of crime and violence. Rodgers and Thorson found that stories about homicides outnumbered any other kind of crime story. And they found that violent crime was proportionally over-represented compared with non-violent crime: 18% of the stories were about homicides, but homicides committed in Los Angeles represented only 1% of the total crime. Robberies and thefts composed only 5% of the total news, but composed 89% of the crimes. Only rapes (3% of the news hole and 1% of real crimes) and aggravated assaults and domestic violence (10% of the news hole and 9% of real crime in Los Angeles) showed fairly close proximity between news and crime patterns. Other examples of what was found when we compared news content and crime statistics can be found in the revised handbook, Reporting on Violence: New Ideas for Television, Print and Web (Stevens, 2001). These comparisons were critically important in encouraging reporters and editors to make efforts at rethinking their crime coverage. Once we demonstrated the feasibility of changing coverage and created the motivation for doing so, the next question concerns specific approaches and content requirements that would be helpful. We suggested that the guiding principle is to find way to report crime and violence in context and make such an approach common practice. This does not mean that details of horrendous or shocking crimes are not reported. Instead, we suggest that reporters add new elements. We suggested they offer their readers more stories that talk about risk factors for crime: poverty, unemployment, alcohol or drug abuse, child neglect or abuse, and family relationships in a way that would provide a backdrop against which their typical reporting could then be seen. This backdrop might be achieved with increasing daily reporting on crime and violence or by weekly or monthly pages or columns devoted to synopses and syntheses of local violence. We suggested they emphasize stories about prevention and about the costs of crime as they relate to medicine, public health, law enforcement, criminal justice, loss of work time, loss of property value, and pain and suffering of victims. We suggested they produce more stories about consequences.

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Influencing change in crime and violence reporting toward a public health frame With the original Handbook completed, and the content analyses prepared for each newspaper we were to work with, the next step was newsroom training sessions. We prepared multidisciplinary teams to present the training sessions. The core team was always comprised of the authors, led by Jane Ellen Stevens (a freelance science and technology reporter with more than 20 years of experience in daily metropolitan newspapers and magazines). Drs. Thorson and Dorfman provided expertise from journalism education and public health respectively. At different points in the project, the core team was augmented by additional experts including a specialist in computer-assisted reporting, a graphic designer, and local public health specialists in violence and injury control, firearms, and domestic violence. To date, five major newspapers have requested and received workshops: the Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Examiner, and San Jose Mercury News. In the workshops, journalists were presented with the public health approach to understanding and preventing violence. They debated its relevance to their own newspaper, and considered ways to adapt the ideas in each newsroom. Each workshop conveyed the same basic information, but was adapted to reflect the differences in each of the newspapers and the communities they cover. For example, Santa Clara County has been proactive in linking public health, law enforcement and criminal justice approaches to understanding and preventing domestic violence. The pioneers of this approach in Santa Clara attended the workshop at the San Jose Mercury News to discuss their innovations and progress so far. In most of the workshops, reporters and editors from different beats attended. We encouraged each paper to invite courts and police reporters, medical and social services or features reporters, city desk editors, and a graphics editor. This way, the differences in how these reporters and editors approach their topics could be assessed and integrated as the paper reconsidered its violence reporting. Some newspapers inclination was to include only crime reporters in the workshop. We explained that a broader range of reporters present would help the paper shift the crime beat to a violence beat. Crime implies only a law enforcement and/or criminal justice component. Violence more accurately reflects the broad issue, and makes room for a public health component. This beat would comprise three key parts: public health, cops, and courts. A medical or science reporter can provide the public health part of the equation, while cops and courts reporters contribute the law enforcement and criminal justice elements, respectively. We also encouraged the newspapers to invite reporters with expertise in computer-assisted reporting to the training session, as these reporters have special expertise in compiling and manipulating databases, and know how to interview the data for news stories. The workshops began with presentation of the content analyses. This allowed participants to see the differences between their coverage and what coverage might look like if a public health frame were employed. These presentations were followed by lively discussions about what readers think about violence as a consequence of news reporting. We presented evidence from the communications literature as summarized above, showing that newspapers give readers only enough information to heighten fear of violence and that readers remain very confused and mistaken about the realities of violence in their communities. Reporters and editors responded with many questions and comments about the interplay between reporters and sources, particularly the police who have their own agenda about crime reporting (greater fear of crime translates to more support for increasing police budgets) as well as the mechanics of news gathering (journalists report whats available; if facts about risk factors are not available

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whether the victim or perpetrator was under the influence of alcohol, for examplethen that information is not reported). After a break, participants heard about research findings from various content studies of crime and violence news coverage. At each newspaper, the ensuing discussion focused on the characteristic of news reports to emphasize the unusual rather than the usual: We report when the plane crashes, not when it flies as one reporter put it. Next, we facilitated an exercise that helped reporters and editors generate new questions to ask when reporting on violence and crime. Participants generated typical questions (Who? What? When? Where? How? and Why?) but also were able to expand the areas of inquiry for different types of violence, from child and elder abuse to youth homicide. We also provided summaries of additional questions to ask and a framework based on an adaptation of the Haddon (1980) matrix for understanding injury control that would help reporters include information from a public health perspective. After lunch, we addressed the question of newspapers characteristic tendency to focus on the unusual. We pointed out that newspapers report the unusual as well as routinely report the status of issues. We asked participants to consider sports, entertainment, business and political reporting, all of which provide updates on the teams, companies, industry or politicians, regardless of whether there is something unusual to report. We argued that this can be done with crime and violence by reporting its context, consequences for victims, families and communities, risk factors, and prevention resources. However, to do this well requires understanding and incorporating data, particularly local data. We then led the discussion on what public health data are available and how reporters can obtain it. The group discussed key definition issues, such as how public health data may differ from law enforcement data. We also included information about national data sets available to the paper through the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR), the FBI, the Centers for Prevention and Disease Control and other local, state and national sources. The last part of the workshop was devoted to a small group exercise that allowed the journalists to delve into the two practical problems our approach raised: 1) integrating context into daily news and 2) creating a regular violence page or column. The exercise was extremely useful because it forced the reporters and editors to grapple with the problems actively, without depending on the opinions of outsiders. At the end of the exercise, the daily news group was frustrated with what still seemed an overwhelming difficulty: obtaining contextualizing data, especially local data, on daily deadlines. The violence page group, on the other hand, was enthusiastic and brimming with ideas. In one workshop, participants even named the page: Safety Net to tie into the newspapers on-line edition and Internet savvy readership. The page they designed would be focused on prevention and the papers role in the community to provide readers the information they need to be safe and healthy. After the Workshop. The reporters who attended the workshops told their editors what they thought of the workshop, and the editors shared the comments with us. Most agreed the day had been provocative and well-spent, even if they did not agree in totality with the new approach. At the Los Angeles Times, one reporters comments were typical: The workshop was interesting. Lots of story ideas and a few good sources (I had no idea the health department amassed such a variety of stats and studies.) I dont agree with some of their proposals, but it certainly is worthwhile to talk about what we do and why we do it. An editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that The opportunity to reflect was helpful and worthwhile, even if our reflections and reactions (the immediate ones, at least) were sometimes defensive and bristly. Reflecting on the workshop several

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months afterwards, a senior editor at the same paper said, I think the workshop had a great effect and is shaping discussions on how we cover crime and noted that a suburban section editor who had attended was now redesigning the section and is factoring all that she learned into the current redesign of the section. After participating in the workshops, each papers reporters produced articles from story ideas that were suggested during the workshops. The editors at the San Jose Mercury News and the Los Angeles Times have indicated that they want to change substantially how they report crime, to include a public health approach. Michelle Guido of the San Jose Mercury News did a series on domestic violence that closely represented the public health frame. In fact, for a year after the original series, she continued to do follow-up stories that included in-depth coverage of domestic-violence related homicides, feature stories, standard news stories of domestic violence related legislation, and other follow-up stories. These are detailed in Reporting on Violence (2001, pp. 20-21). Although the San Francisco Examiner decided not to pursue major changes, the assistant city editor has continued to be receptive to our feedback on crime stories. The Sacramento Bee addressed some issues brought up in the workshop and published a week-long, extensive series on violence and crime in the community. Studying the Impact of Public Health Based Reporting One of the newest aspects of our approach to public health based crime news has been to experiment with the impact of the new kinds of stories being produced. Although this work is new, several exemplary studies have been supportive of the importance of public health crime reporting. Reber and Chang (2000) looked at responses to phone survey questions to adults in mid-America, and found that public health aspects of crime reports were strongly desired. For example, around half the adult respondents wanted to know more about victims families and the consequences to them. Nearly 85% of the respondents wanted to know how typical crimes really were. Coleman and Thorson (2002) directly compared traditional crime stories to those that put crime and violence into context. They showed that readers of the public health framed stories were more likely to perceive societal variables as causing crime. Readers of traditional stories placed more blame on individuals than societal variables. . They also more strongly believed that crime events are random, and illogical. In a second study, which looked at learning, readers of public health-based stories showed greater factual knowledge than readers of traditional stories. Public health story readers were also more likely to support preventive approaches to crime than were readers of traditional stories. The primary negative finding in the study was that readers liked the public-health based stories less than the traditional ones. Certainly more of this kind of research will be important to the long-term development of public health based reporting, but these two examples provide some initial encouraging data about impact on news consumers. Teaching Public Health Based Reporting to Journalism Students Whereas researchers are working with major American newspapers to help them rethink how they handle crime and violence reporting, we find that one of the most difficult problems is to help reporters think differently about the whole beat. In other words, when they have been reporting cops and courts for a while, getting change to occur is very difficult. For that reason, we wanted to take students early in their 61

journalism education and see whether we could get them to think about crime and violence from a public health point of view. To date, an advanced reporting seminar, Public Health Based Crime Reporting has been offered twice at the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri. In the first such effort, Professor Judy Bolch of the School of Journalism teamtaught the course with Thorson. In the second, Bolch and Thorson were joined via the internet by Stevens. The first course resulted in a special magazine insert of long stories in the Columbia Missourian. The second course resulted in a series of stories that ran over 10 days in the Columbia Missourian. Copies of both sets of stories are available from Thorson. A syllabus for the course (Reporting on Violence: Instructors Guide) is available online at http:///www.bmsg.org/content/58.php. The course was approached with three underlying goals: 1) to acknowledge current crime and violence paradigms; 2) to understand the public health mode of reporting and to reshape our paradigms to reflect those ideas; and 3) to execute and publish projects exemplifying the differences. A weekly seminar was supplemented by individual editor/reporter conferences. Analyzing traditional crime coverage. The students in both offerings of the course were a mixture of graduates and undergraduates whose professional experience ranged from zero to several years. These students all brought the common definition of news values to the course. They knew that in most newsrooms a crime's news potential is evaluated in terms of its abnormality, not its normality. The more bizarre and sensational, of course, the more likely a crime is to be covered. From day one, we asked that students examine all crime stories in terms of perception vs. reality. We began immediately to discuss the contrast between what people believe about the nature and prevalence of crime, based on what the media report, and its actual characteristics and occurrences. We used Krajicek (1998) as an introduction to how the media has distorted the public's view of crime and violence. Although the book does not address the public health concept per se, it documents the extent of the distortions at work and calls for reporting that provides citizens with the information needed to make informed judgments about the issues. With this as our initial text, we examined ordinary daily stories of crime and bigger takeouts on events such as the 1998 onthe-job murders of two guards at the U.S. Capitol. Students quickly became sensitized to how ordinary day-to-day coverage provides little information on which to base personal decisions about safety or community decisions about the legal and judicial systems. They noted the arbitrary nature of which crimes received treatment as briefs or short articles. And, they learned, even when major publications give crimes such as the Capitol shootout their best efforts, the real issues involved (the mental health system's inability to control patients such as the gunman, for instance) usually receive only passing attention. Establishing an understanding of effects research was also important. An article on the impact of newspaper stories on fear of crime (Heath, 1984) provided some of this background. Heath reveals that stories covering sensational crimes and/or lacking information about precipitating events will increase readers' fear of crime. Her findings also show that while factors such as randomness and sensationalism will increase fear if related to local crime, they will actually decrease fear if the crime occurs at a distance. We used these and other effects research like that reviewed earlier in this paper to document the far-reaching consequences of what we print and to convince students of the value of change. Changing the paradigm. Once the class had explored the nature of most newspaper crime news, we moved on to discussion of possible improvements via the public health model of reporting. We looked at how coverage of smoking and auto safety had altered over the years (e.g., see Stevens, 1998). When journalists became convinced

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these were public health issues, not just individual poor choices or bad luck, the tenor of coverage shifted. By presenting these subjects as correctable social ills, the media contributed to a national viewpoint that ultimately led to new ways to handle the dangers of the cigarette and the car. The class was asked to consider whether the same factors applied to stories about crime and violence. The class, however, chose to focus not on deadline stories but on longer-term pieces. When we defined their basic underlying premise as the need for "context-integrated" reporting, we helped students operationalize the risk factors vital to include in all such pieces: context, consequences, risk factors, and resources that help the readers as individuals and as citizens. Finding ways to uncover this information for any given topic demanded that students adopt a new attitude toward sourcing. Because we wanted as much numerical data and as much original analysis as possible, the need for computer-assisted reporting became clear. Students worked with staffers at Investigative Reporters and Editors and the National Institute of Computer-Assisted Reporting to locate and decipher data. Getting the raw data from local law enforcement and from the FBI proved difficult but provided valuable experience. In addition, we stressed the necessity of finding the best experts, not just the local ones, to provide interpretation and background. All of these activities expanded student concepts of how to collect and present meaningful material. The final stories successfully put crime in context. One story compared a high-crime neighborhood with a contiguous low-crime area, looking at how infrastructure factors such as population density, rental units, income and physical amenities might relate to violence. Another mapped the location of each of the previous year's burglaries, looking for patterns not only of site but also of time and items stolen. A third student explored the ripple effects of seemingly minor crimes such as larceny, burglary and auto theft and documented the cost of such incidents not only to the victim's financial and mental health but to the public via police, courts and insurance industry. A fourth story examined the county's loose handgun laws, charting how many permits had been issued in each zip code and suggesting possible consequences of current regulations. Two other students devised a prototype for a crime page by providing a framework of six elements that could be used to write about any crime. One especially interesting, and still ongoing, project documented the city's crime rates for the last five years. Although the rates themselves were of interest, this project also discussed the pitfalls and problems of the FBI's Uniform Crime Report. Reader reaction to the project was positive. Conclusion Creating and diffusing a public health model of crime and violence reporting is a difficult task. Although the idea that crime and violence are in the domain of public health is well-established in the medical field, covering these topics predominantly as law enforcement and criminal justice issues is hard engrained in the thinking of journalists. Indeed, calling this area of coverage cops and courts truly epitomizes how most journalists think about crime and violence. We have argued here, however, that it is critically important to our society to expand how news frames crime and violence. Doing so will increase the tools people have available for thinking about what should be done to prevent the level of damage that we currently experience from crime and violence. Our approach has been to conceptualize how public health-based news about crime and violence should look, work with real journalists to begin the innovations that will occur as this frame becomes more common, continue a research program that investigates the impact of the new public health based reporting, and to begin teaching journalism

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students how to do this kind of reporting. We continue with these efforts. In addition, we are working now with broadcast news and the internet to see how these news formats can be used to talk about crime and violence from a public health perspective. Our work with television can be sampled by visiting http://www.newslab.org, where examples of streaming media broadcast examples are seen under the topic Covering Crime in Context. Our work with the internet can be sampled by visiting the online newspaper of the Topeka Capital Journal (www.cjonline.com) or the Reporting on Violence section of www.bmsg.org. We are encouraged by this progress and look forward to the day when a public health frame on crime and violence is found in virtually all news outlets. References
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