Crime and the Courts

Crime as News

Crime stories dominate most American news media. Numerous content analyses of newspapers and television stations have shown that local media are saturated with accounts of crime, hence the local television newsroom adage, “If it bleeds it leads.” Public interest in crime news is generally high, providing a commercial incentive for newspapers and broadcasters to cover more crime news. Furthermore, crimes usually make good news stories in that they provide crucial drama and human interest (and pictures for the electronic media) even though they may not always provide substantial news value. Because of the ways that journalists cultivate relationships on their beats, crime news can be fairly easy to report, often with willing sources (victims, police) who want to tell their stories. However, research has shown that not all violent crime is covered with the same prominence in the media; journalists typically weigh how much a given crime deviates from the norm in deciding how much coverage it gets. So, statistically speaking, unlikely victims or perpetrators, unusual methods, or sympathetic victims receive more coverage than “status quo” criminal events. Intense media coverage has even been correlated with a decrease in plea bargaining in the prosecutor's office.

While crime news coverage can have a direct impact on the actual criminal proceedings, research also shows that the level and types of crime stories are not indicative of actual criminal statistics. Television news, for example, overemphasizes crime and is disproportionately focused on bizarre crimes. Newspaper coverage has shown biases of gender, age, race, and socioeconomic status, and studies suggest that such biases influence public perception of both perpetrators and victims. Repeated exposure to this unbalanced information in the press appears to lead readers and viewers to feel more threatened and afraid of becoming a victim of a violent crime.

Crime news not only dominates local media but also figures prominently on cable news networks with national coverage. Court TV is the obvious example. It came about as one response to the public's seemingly insatiable appetite for crime and court stories. In 1995, Court TV saw a huge boost in viewership during its coverage of the O. J. Simpson murder trial and the increased interest in all courtroom drama. Later, the channel started airing fiction crime and court shows such as Homicide: Life on the Street and Forensic Files.

Effects of Coverage

This blurring between real and fictional events is significant because polls show that the public forms opinions about crime more from what they see or read in the news media rather than personal experience. Scholars have examined the effect of this crime coverage to show that people who are heavy viewers of television tend to replace actual reality with a television version of that reality. George Gerbner first wrote about this idea, which he dubbed “cultivation,” when he argued that people who watch a lot of television base their reality far more on impressions left by television viewing rather than their own experience or knowledge. These television viewers think the world is a scarier place than it really is because television news and drama focus so much on crime. Polls confirm this, showing that a majority of respondents say that media coverage of violent crime increases their own fear of being a victim.

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