Too Much Blood, Too Little Reporting

I made a resolution years ago to stop watching cop shows right before I went to bed. The corpses and car chases were giving me nightmares. Now I’ve vowed to stop watching the 11 p.m. newscasts on TV. The nightly tradition of “reporting live” from the latest crime scene is keeping me up nights.

Steve Weinstein’s profile of Mark Hoffman, KNBC’s new news director, clearly outlined what is wrong with broadcast news in Los Angeles (“KNBC: New Emphasis on a ‘Solid Newscast,’ ” Calendar, Aug. 9). Hoffman’s boss, KNBC General Manager Reed Manville, defends his station’s preoccupation with blood and vengeance by saying viewers want crime stories--”it makes them feel better about their own situation, that it’s not their family.”

And we wonder why our city is increasingly becoming Balkanized? “Thank God it’s not in my neighborhood,” we sigh with relief.

Crime stories do not make us feel better. They scare the dickens out of us. They make us demand more police protection--but, of course, KNBC admittedly skimps on covering government, the agency that hires the police.

Hoffman defends his station’s lousy coverage of the mayor’s race--an election that included, by the way, an unsuccessful measure to put more cops on the street--by saying “only half of those who are eligible to vote are even registered, and only half of them bother to vote.” I wonder why? Could it be because viewers didn’t know there was a mayor’s race going on--that they had no way of sifting through the two dozen candidates who threw their hats into the ring in the first L.A. mayor’s race without an incumbent in most of our lifetimes?

Covering politics doesn’t have to be boring. Why not profile one candidate every night? Send a camera crew and a reporter to tag along for half a day. Let the tape roll, sneak in the tough questions. Introduce the viewer to the candidate as he or she putters around in the rose garden or plows through the pile of paperwork on the desk. Let us see the candidate in action.

And how about a news story showing exactly what a mayor has the power to accomplish? Why not use those clever computer graphics to make sense of the numbers the candidates were bandying about? Or paint us pictures of just how much in the red the county and state governments are this year. Show us the equivalent of county red ink in piles of $100 bills or parking lots of new cars.

Television is a wonderful medium. It can tell a story with pictures. Use it. It’s not as sexy as Heidi Fleiss stories, I admit; not as colorful as shots of fresh blood on the boulevard, I agree. But don’t we have a responsibility as reporters to inform our community?

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And if crime is of such great interest, why not put it into some kind of context? Or better, give the viewers something they can do about it? Programs like Community Youth Gang Services and Hope in Youth--organizations intent on preventing violence--are starving for money. And volunteers. Why not a story showing the correlation between illiteracy and a life of crime? Then show a literacy program that works.

I’m not advocating goody-two-shoes news here. I’m just asking that those who make news decisions realize that they have a responsibility to this community, especially now. It may be hard to believe watching what passes for news in this town, but local TV news is actually respected in other communities around this country.

It can be done here as well. It must be done. Or our community we call Southern California will become nothing more than an armed fortress of strangers.