Content-Type: text/html
Teaching Crime and Violence Reporting from a Public Health Perspective
Judy Bolch
and
Esther Thorson
School of Journalism
University of Missouri-Columbia
Paper submitted for presentation to the 2001 Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
The authors thank Jane Stevens and Lori Dorfman, Berkeley Media Studies Center, for their pioneering work in conceptualizing the public health reporting perspective, and for spending time with the students who took our course.
Teaching Crime and Violence Reporting from a Public Health Perspective
Abstract
This paper describes the public health perspective on crime and violence reporting and then justifies that approach by looking briefly at the extensive literature that has developed on the patterns of crime reporting that characterize American Journalism. This literature also suggests some of the detrimental effects on Americans of such reporting. With the public health reporting perspective justified, the paper then describes how the approach was used to teach crime and violence reporting to a class of undergraduate and graduate students. Readings, student work, and student evaluations of the course are described. The authors contend that this new way of teaching “cops and courts” suggests a potential benefit in linking research on journalistic content and critique of that content with hands-on teaching of young reporters.
Teaching Crime and Violence
Reporting from a Public Health Perspective
Background and overview
Alcohol, not crack cocaine or other illegal drugs, is the substance most often associated with violent acts. At least half the murders in the U.S. are committed by the victim’s family or acquaintances. In 90 percent of murders, victim and assailant are of the same race (Stevens and Dorfman, 1997).
Many of these facts surprise most Americans. It is our contention, outlined in this paper, that the way the news media represent crime and violence is an important factor in the creation of people’s misperceptions. Indeed, we will discuss the evidence that the way the media present crime and violence ignores or even misrepresents, real and important patterns in crime and violence. Furthermore, for the last few years we have been working with newsrooms throughout the United States to design better ways to report the news. This is, however, a long and slow process. For that reason, we decided that the best way to try to change crime reporting practice was to begin in the newswriting classroom. In this paper, we therefore describe both what we call a public health perspective on crime reporting and how we employed this point of view in teaching crime and violence reporting.
When one considers that homicide and suicide are among the top ten causes of premature death, right up there with cancer and heart disease, it is easy to realize just how important this issue is. In fact, the impact of crime and violence is such that since the 1970s, epidemiologists have begun to treat the two as they would an epidemic (Stevens, 1998). In fact, public health professionals view prevention, reduction and control of crime and violence in the same way they would any other epidemic, that is, as a public health issue. The news media, however, do not. They conceptualize crime and violence primarily in terms of law enforcement and criminal justice. Thus it can be argued that crime and violence news misses an important part of the story, the public health perspective. In this paper we examine the research on news coverage of crime and violence, and then discuss an advanced specialized reporting course we designed and taught with the goal of developing better thinkin
g about how to report these critically important topics better.
Research on crime and violence news
Many researchers argue that news about crime and violence has become degraded and misrepresentative to a disturbing and unacceptable degree. David Krajicek (1998), in fact, subtitles his critique of crime and violence news, “media miss real story on crime while chasing sex, sleaze and celebrities.” Westfeldt and Wicker (1998) also critique news coverage of crime and violence, but an important part of their proposed solution is that there should be more intense coverage of the criminal justice system.
In contrast, we believe that reporting crime and violence from a public health point of view is sufficiently important to warrant teaching the approach to journalism students. The public health perspective assumes an important part of solutions to problems stemming from violence is the provision of critically important information and news to people about causes and consequences of violence. Before examining how we went about the teaching of this approach, however, it is necessary to articulate the rationale for public health perspective, and provide evidence that current reporting is sadly lacking in this perspective.
We look first at the major criticisms of crime and violence news. We also look at the intersection of race, age and gender issues, and crime and violence. We articulate what would be desirable attributes of reporting crime and violence from the public health point of view. We then discuss how we taught a public health perspective on specialized reporting.
News about crime and violence has been a staple of U.S. newspapers since before the penny press (Dorfman & Thorson, 1998). But at least since the 1950s, crime news has been criticized extensively. These criticisms can be summarized under five topics:
(1) Crime news misrepresents the relative frequency of various types of crime (e.g., Davis, 1952; Jones, 1976; Dominick, 1978; Garofalo, 1981; Fedler & Jordan, 1982; Winhauser et al., 1980; Jerin & Fields, 1994; Barlow, Barlow & Chiricos, 1995). Dorfman, Thorson, & Stevens (in press) 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 involve violence. The researchers 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 & Dorfman, 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. Stevens and Dorfman (1997) point out that a large proportion of crimes are committed under the influence of alcohol but that this causal factor is seldomly reported.
(4) Crime news fosters stereotypes by over- or underrepresenting certain ethnicities, gender and age of victims and perpetrators (Halloran, 1978; Barlow, Barlow & Chiricos, 1995; Williams & Dickenson, 1993; Farkas and Duffett, 1998; Miller, 1998, & 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 African-American or Hispanic. Sorenson et al (1997) analyzed all Los Angeles Times stories about homicides occurring 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 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) reports 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; Dorfman, 1998). 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 “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 victim’s 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 accurately. But what, if anything, is the impact on consumers of crime news? The research literature provides support for negative impacts that fall into four categories: people’s overestimation of the frequency of different classes of crime and violence; increase in fear levels, failure to register the fact that crime has decreased in the past few years, and encouragement of support of punative and discouragement of support of preventive crime policies. We look briefly at each of these kinds of effects.
Looking first at mistaken estimates of crime and violence frequency, O’Keefe (1984) 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 one’s city and one’s 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 Center’s 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 worry 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 have seriously considered leaving at least partly because of crime. In spite of these high levels of concern about crime, only 7% indicated they had been a victim of a violent crime and 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.
So it is clear that the way crime news is structured makes some important differences to 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 public health point of view.
Stevens (1998) has been working for several years on this question. 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 face of crime. Also, violence has consequences--for families of 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). In providing this information, Stevens suggests a variety of specific content be added. Examples include: (1) regularly providing 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) i
nformation that puts violent incidents into context about what is usual and can be prevented, and what is unusual and cannot be prevented; (4) information of methods being developed to prevent violence and how successful they are; and (5) information about whether people’s 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 (Race, crime, and the media, 2000), 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.
Given the shortcomings in current crime and violence reporting, what can be done? We suggest 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 sometimes reported. Instead, we add new elements. We offer more stories that talk about risk factors for crime: poverty, unemployment, alcohol or drug abuse, child neglect or abuse, and family relationships.
We 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 produce more stories about consequences. What happens to the families of victims and offenders, for example?
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, but the time 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 journalism education and see whether we could get them to think about this area from a public health point of view.
Organization of the course
We approached the course 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 3) to execute and publish projects exemplifying the differences.
The class was conceived as a theoretical framework that would produce different sorts of stories for the Columbia Missourian, a daily community newspaper operated by the University of Missouri School of Journalism and a paper whose crime coverage reflects the traditions and
approaches most frequently found in the industry. A weekly seminar was supplemented by individual editor/reporter conferences.
Analyzing traditional crime coverage. The students, a mixture of graduates and undergraduates whose professional experience ranged from zero to several years, 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 Scooped! Media Miss Real Story on Crime While Chasing Sex, Sleaze and Celebrities (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 on-the-job murders of two guards at the U.S. Capitol. Student
s 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. Her research 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 incre
ase 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 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.
As we studied how crime coverage might be modified, "Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety" (James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, Atlantic Monthly, March 1982) and "The Tipping Point: Why Is the City Suddenly so Much Safer - Could It Be That Crime Really Is an Epidemic?" (Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, June 3, 1996) were two especially useful articles. They established the value of understanding - and writing about - the underlying forces affecting crime and served as models for the students' own research. The class also used Reporting on Violence: A Handbook for Journalists (Stevens & Dorfman, 1997) to lay the groundwork not only for public health theory but also as a sourcebook. Reporting on Violence postulates strengthening deadline reporting by adding big picture information to each and every crime story. An article on someone charged with drunk driving would, for example, be bolstered with statistics on the overall incidence and cost of such cases.
Our 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 quickly determined several factors vital to include in all such pieces:
· Context
· Consequences
· Risk factors
· 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 this expanded student concepts of how to collect and present meaningful material.
Putting the principles into action. When an old-time "gotcha" investigative journalist stopped by our class one day, student reactions to her comments indicated how strongly most had adopted the public health premise. They were outraged at the adversarial pose implied in her expose-oriented methods. Indeed, while this new kind of reporting does not shrink from confrontation or negative outcomes when justifiable, its main goal is not to uncover wrongdoing per se but to provide the information on which citizens, as well as those in authority, can make the best decisions.
As students began to think about story ideas, they looked for topics that explored origins, risks, effects, patterns and unintended consequences. Our approach consciously violated several journalistic conventions. None of the stories focused on individual victims. We felt that might blur the message that the community as a whole is the real victim. None of the stories had an immediate news "peg." We also stressed, as mentioned earlier, that national experts with broader perspectives were necessary to supplement local viewpoints. Because the presentation of any story is a vital part of its impact and influence, we published most of the student work in a special section inserted in the Sunday newspaper (Copies of the special section are available from the authors.) Not only did this allow reporters to work directly with photographers and designers, but running all stories as a package meant that the meaning of one piece was clarified by its juxtaposition with the others.
All the layouts included information on resources the reader might use to learn more or to offer help in finding solutions to the problem. Their stories, as you will see from the following examples, 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 proj
ect also discussed the pitfalls and problems of the FBI's Uniform Crime Report. Reader reaction to the project was positive.
Reader reaction to the project was positive. The police chief especially approved of its premise and execution. This was especially interesting since the Missourian has often had an adversarial relationship with the local police department.
A WORD FROM THE STUDENTS
The students were largely positive about the course. What follows are some representative comments that were made at the end of the course.
“Reporters should think how they approach their beat, looking not only for interesting crime, but interesting patterns in crime. Reporters should also identify efforts to reduce crime — not just traditional law enforcement, but efforts to reduce the root causes of crime. Reporters should look for those kinds of ideas in many different places — public policy, advocacy groups, academics, law enforcement, even individual citizens. The story I wrote this semester allowed me to apply those tactics. I approached crime from the back door, looking first at issues in the community, then relating the issues to crime. I think that’s an important step in the process of restructuring crime reporting.”
“I would like to see all J-School students learn this new concept of crime reporting….As a highly regarded journalism school, we should be changing the ways everyone presents news — particularly in situations where we can be more responsible. As leaders in the field, we should be able to leave here and impact journalism for the better. Crime as a public health issue is one tool everyone can use to do this.”
“No one would ever think of running a business story on a stock market crash without providing contextual information about how it happened and how people can protect their money in the future, or writing a sports story without mentioning how a certain game figures in the playoffs. Yet journalists write stories about crimes that leave the readers hanging at the end, unable to draw a conclusion other than ‘I’m glad it didn’t happen to me.’ Each crime reads as a separate episode and readers are hard-pressed to make connections…because reporters fail to do so….Unfortunately, I don’t think many professors and editors make this clear. Many of my peers are still taught to cover crimes as breaking news.”
“When I first began this course, I was a little skeptical of this new approach….I’ve since learned that this approach isn’t as foreign (or at least it shouldn’t be) as I first thought it was. To me, it just seems like good reporting. Why wouldn’t a journalist examine all the aspects and angles to a story? Having worked at newspapers, I understand the daily pressures of the business — and the idea that there’s not enough time to really explore a story as fully as possible. To some extent, this is true and will remain true. Stories such as the ones we’ve been working on often take more time than some editors are willing to give. But with a little thinking, or re-thinking rather, beforehand, public health perspectives could find themselves in daily crime stories.”
“What a difference a semester makes. Last year I was a cops and courts reporter. I was going to court close to four days a week and listening to the police scanner on the weekends. This was the essence of crime and violence reporting to me. I wrote stories about arraignments, murder trials, car accidents, street brawls, even bear attacks. Most of the things I wrote turned into two-inch briefs….Now this semester I have spent months looking at numbers that give me a much better idea of what crime is….I find this class one of the most beneficial I have taken in the J-School. The best thing about it was the structure. Spending a few weeks getting a grasp of the ideas and the rest of the time being given freedom to explore, initiate and pursue our own issues and stories was a welcome relief from the usual nature of the J-School.”
“It seems to me the biggest obstacles to reporting violence as a public health concern are deadlines. No matter how much reporters may want to write about how a violent incident fits with national statistics and what risk factors could have been predictors, they have a limited time…That is why I agree that it is very important for reporters to develop and constantly update a database of facts and information that is easily accessible. With preliminary research already out of the way, reporters could get relevant contextual information quickly.”
“One of the major concepts emphasized in this class is that numbers can mean a million different things….This means two things. First, journalists need to know where to find these numbers, and the public is going to have to trust new sources. Second, if a reporter is only going to the local police department for statistics, he is learning very little about the facts of a certain type of crime.”
CONCLUSIONS:
Outcomes of the course reinforced our belief in the value and importance of this kind of reporting. Although the articles produced provided realistic examples of the kind of work evolving from this approach, our main finding was that teaching crime and violence reporting in the public health mode leads to a mindset likely to have far-reaching consequences for young journalists. All involved agree that although providing context, consequences, risk factors and resource information in each and every deadline crime story may be impossible, this introduction to the public health concept will influence the way they think about, and thus present, crime in every case. Being aware of how easy it is to produce news based strictly on momentary factors that blur or misrepresent the larger patterns will, for example, be an ever-present cautionary element. When they choose which murders to feature, they will know that making a splash of the death of a white, upper-class woman killed by a stran
ger should be couched in terms that make it clear this is the exception, rather than the norm. In addition, the knowledge of how much more information is available than that normally provided by police or other local members of the legal system will spur attempts at deeper fact-finding even on deadline. Perhaps the most long-lasting effect, however, will be their recognition of the responsibility that writing even a seemingly innocuous crime brief carries in a society inundated over and over again by such carelessly rendered, mindlessly conveyed bits of “news.”
The course also re-enforced the importance of an intellectual basis for journalism courses. Too often, journalism classes exemplify one of two extremes: the strictly academic study of, for example, history or the skills course that professes “this is how we do things” without exploring the justification for those choices. Clearly, crime coverage, with its decades of shoot-em-up guidelines is not the only coverage area that would benefit from a re-examination of the tenets behind the traditions. And from our experience in this course, it seems that students, unencumbered by the past, may be the most likely leaders of such changes.
We sent copies of CrimeScene, as we called the special section containing some of the stories and an explanation of the theory on which they were launched, to hundreds of academics and media professionals. Many were intrigued by the public health theory of crime and violence and by the students’ work.
As Melanie Sill, managing editor of The (Raleigh, N.C.) News & Observer says, “These are concepts that often don’t occur to journalists until mid-career, yet here they are in student work. Context. Impact. Consequences. When you see a student journalist think to look into the demographic patterns in a neighborhood in discussing crime rates, you know you’re onto something valuable. Beyond that, the concepts and tools offered in ‘Reporting on Violence’ offer new ideas for veteran journalists on information sources, story frameworks and contextual reporting that can deepen and broaden traditional crime coverage. While the prescriptive approach may not be for everyone, the theory challenges some assumptions and highlights some gaps in traditional approaches.”
A word from the students
· "Reporters should think how they approach their beat, looking not only for interesting crime, but interesting patterns in crime. Reporters should also identify efforts to reduce crime - not just traditional law enforcement, but efforts to reduce the root causes of crime. Reporters should look for those kinds of ideas in many different places - public policy, advocacy groups, academics, law enforcement, even individual citizens. The story I wrote this semester allowed me to apply those tactics. I approached crime from the back door, looking first at issues
in the community, then relating the issues to crime. I think that's an important step in the process of restructuring crime reporting."
· "I would like to see all J-School students learn this new concept of crime reporting....As a highly regarded journalism school we should be changing the ways everyone presents news - particularly in situations where we can be more responsible. As leaders in the field, we should be able to leave here and impact journalism for the better. Crime as a public health issue is one tool everyone can use to do this."
· "No one would ever think of running a business story on a stock market crash without providing contextual information about how it happened and how people can protect their money in the future. Or writing a sports story without mentioning how a certain game figures in the playoffs. Yet journalists write stories about crimes that leave the readers hanging at the end, unable to draw a conclusion other than 'I'm glad it didn't happen to me.' Each crime reads as a separate episode and readers are hard-pressed to make connections...because reporters fail to do so....Unfortunately, I don't think many professors and editors make this clear. Many of my peers are still taught to cover crimes as breaking
news."
· "When I first began this course, I was a little skeptical of this new approach....I've since learned that this approach isn't as foreign (or at least it shouldn't be) as I first thought it was. To me, it just seems like good reporting. Why wouldn't a journalist examine all the
aspects and angles to a story? Having worked at newspapers, I understand the daily pressures of the business - and the idea that there's not enough time to really explore a story as fully as possible. To some extent, this is true and will remain true. Stories such as the ones we've been working on often take more time than some editors are willing to give. But with a little thinking, or re-thinking rather, beforehand, public health perspectives could find themselves in daily crime stories."
· "What a difference a semester makes. Last year I was a cops and courts reporter. I was going to court close to four days a week and listening to the police scanner on the weekends. This was the essence of crime and violence reporting to me. I wrote stories about arraignments, murder
trials, car accidents, street brawls, even bear attacks. Most of the things I wrote turned into two-inch briefs....Now this semester I have spent months looking at numbers that give me a much better idea of what crime is....I find this class one of the most beneficial I have taken in
the J-School. The best thing about it was the structure. Spending a few weeks getting a grasp of the ideas and the rest of the time being given freedom to explore, initiate and pursue our own issues and stories was a welcome relief from the usual nature of the J-School."
· "It seems to me the biggest obstacles to reporting violence as a public health concern are deadlines. No matter how much reporters may want to write about how a violent incident fits with national statistics and what risk factors could have been predictors, they have a limited
time...That is why I agree that it is very important for reporters to develop and constantly update a database of facts and information that is easily accessible. With preliminary research already out of the way, reporters could get relevant contextual information quickly."
· "One of the major concepts emphasized in this class is that numbers can mean a million different things. This means two things. First, journalists need to know where to find these numbers, and the public is going to have to trust new sources. Second, if a reporter is only going to the local police department for statistics, he is learning very little about the facts of a certain type of crime."
Conclusions
Outcomes of the course reinforced our belief in the value and importance of this kind of reporting. Although the articles produced provided realistic examples of the kind of work evolving from this approach, our main finding was that teaching crime and violence reporting in the public health mode leads to a mindset likely to have far-reaching consequences for young journalists. All involved in the course agreed that although providing context, consequences, risk factors and resource information in each and every deadline crime story may be impossible, this introduction to the public health concept of crime and violence will influence the way they think about and thus present, crime in every case. Being aware of how easy it is to produce news based strictly on momentary factors that blur or misrepresent the larger patterns will, for example, be an ever-present cautionary element. When they choose which murders to features, they will know that making a splash of the death of a
white, upper-class woman killed by a stranger should be couched in terms that make it clear this is the exception, rather than the norm. In addition, the knowledge of how much more information is available than that normally provided y police or other local members of the legal system will spur attempts at deeper fact-finding even on deadline. Perhaps the most long-lasting effect, however, will be their recognition of the responsibility that writing even a seemingly innocuous crime brief carries in a society inundated over and over again by such carelessly rendered, mindlessly conveyed bits of “news.”
Antecol, Michael, & Thorson, Esther (1999, August). Cognitive filtration of crime and violence news. Paper presented at the 1999 annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, New Orleans.
Barlow, M.H., Barlow, D.E., & Chiricos, T.G. (1995). Economic conditions and ideologies of crime in the media: A content anlaysis of crime news. Crime and Delinquency, 44, 3-19.
Davis, F. (1951). Crime news in Colorado newspapers. A,erican Journal of Sociology, 57, 325-330.
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