COLUMN ONE : Tuning Out the Hype and Gore : After years of ‘tabloid’ journalism, some TV stations are muting their coverage of crime. Is it a ratings ploy or an effort to reduce the sensationalism that some blame for inflaming public fear?

“Good evening, everyone. Tonight’s top story is quite simply about fear.”

It could have been the lead-in to any local newscast on any night in America, one more doom-laden account of urban butchery and its attendant body bags, blood-caked sidewalks and wailing survivors. But in late September, WCCO-TV, a CBS affiliate in Minneapolis, shook up the familiar formula of crime and violence that dominates local television news.

After a motorist had been dragged from his car in north Minneapolis and fatally shot by bicycle-mounted attackers, WCCO explained to its viewers why they should not feel afraid. Most of the region’s residents, anchor Don Shelby intoned, were rarely exposed to the “clear but limited pattern” of random murder.

For a medium that has spent two decades honing and expanding its relentless coverage of crime, WCCO’s retreat was perhaps little more than a small step back.

Yet in a year when Americans have singled out criminal violence as the most critical national concern, any rethinking of television’s obsession with crime comes as startling news.

Since January, when WCCO announced a policy to remove violent images from a dinner-hour broadcast easily viewed by children, at least two dozen stations around the country--none in Southern California--have begun tinkering with their old ways of covering crime. Adherents claim that they are responding to a public weary of hyped crime coverage, while many industry veterans belittle the moves as shallow attempts to attract attention and boost ratings.

Editors at WCCO routinely erase tapes of bodies on gurneys, wounded gunshot victims and bloodied crime scenes from the 5 p.m. newscast--although those images often appear on later broadcasts. WMAR in Baltimore edits out gory footage from all newscasts and has reduced the time it devotes to routine slayings. In Tyler, Tex., KETK-TV no longer airs stories about non-fatal shootings and stabbings, once a common feature of its coverage.

“People are just tired of being afraid and tired of what we’ve been selling them,” said John Lansing, a news executive who pioneered “family sensitive” news at WCCO and now manages a larger laboratory for his ideas at the Chicago CBS affiliate.

Television executives and consultants in most major markets remain suspicious, perceiving WCCO’s experiments as “a marketing technique,” said veteran consultant Eric Braun.

Whether the experiments catch on elsewhere may well depend on how stations respond to an unresolved question about TV’s impact: Does its emphasis on crime reflect or inflame the public’s sense of insecurity?

Several recent studies have suggested that crime coverage does appear to influence fear. One report released this year by the Chicago Council on Urban Affairs found that the city’s news stations devoted more than half their air time to violence. And preliminary evidence from a UC Berkeley psychiatric study of California and Utah children who watched coverage of the Polly Klaas murder reveals lingering effects ranging from loss of sleep to a shared sense of peril.

Much of this research has come in an era dominated by the rise of “tabloid news,” a style of lightning-paced, crime-dominated local coverage eagerly adopted over the past four years by big city stations trying to overtake rivals in the ceaseless ratings wars.

Launched at a Fox affiliate in Miami almost four years ago, tabloid-influenced local news still draws viewers there and in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, thriving on a steady diet of sensational murders, dramatic accident footage and helicopter-camera views of police car chases.

Those who analyze television’s impact on viewers have repeatedly drawn a bead on local coverage as the most influential and pervasive of media outlets.

Both newspapers and television’s new hybrids--”Cops” and other police reality shows and tabloid programs like “Hard Copy”--also have been criticized for their crime reporting. But local TV’s impact is immediate and near, lacking the stylized distance of the programs that often cover celebrity cases or show police solving crimes. And local news reaches a much wider audience than newspapers, sometimes intensifying fears in rural communities remote from urban violence.

Local news outlets fixated on crime coverage rarely “make the attempt to draw isolated incidents into any context,” said Robert Entman, a Northwestern University communications professor who headed the Chicago study. “They heighten the public’s sense of urgency and danger.”

Yet the daily litany of urban horrors--in Chicago, a numbing parade of murders committed this summer by 10- and 11-year-old children--convinces others that such perceptions are justified.

“The kind of fear we’ve been seeing can’t just be whipped up,” said Roger L. Conner, executive director of the American Alliance for Rights and Responsibilities, a Washington-based public interest group. “People say it’s a media creation, but it’s grounded in our own real experience.”

A Los Angeles Times Poll conducted on crime issues in January found that 68% of Americans watch TV news reports of violence almost every day. And 82% of respondents said they believed those images increase viewers’ fears of crime.

“Too much of what we see on the nightly news is useless information,” said Brian Baxter, a Minneapolis bookseller who watches local newscasts every night. “All you get out of it is anxiety.”

It is a common complaint usually shrugged off by local stations. But last Jan. 10 at WCCO, after hearing that message for months in viewer-complaint sessions, news director Lansing ordered his staff to produce a “family sensitive” newscast aimed at protecting children from graphic footage of death and violence in dinner-hour reports.

Editors were told to remove shots of bodies, blood and grieving families from the 5 p.m. newscast. That one hour was selected, Lansing explained later, because it was “the time our research determined that a lot of children have control of the TV set.”

Sanitizing a single newscast led critics like University of Miami communications professor Joseph Angotti to question “how you think you can do any good by cleaning up your act for one newscast and then going wild again an hour later?”

Lansing said he had “no control” over violence broadcast on the CBS national news at 5:30 p.m.--and that later local newscasts had smaller “family” audiences.

WCCO’s reporters, camera operators and video editors were equally suspicious of the sudden move. Those wielding the cameras were urged to shoot the same graphic footage they always had. But editors were told to abandon well-honed instincts to use the most startling images--even for only one newscast each day.

“At first we felt our hands were tied,” said chief editor Brian Halliday. “This is a visually intensive media and there’s not much to work with at a murder scene if all you can show are street lights.”

Over time, Halliday has adapted. Asked recently for old footage of the motorist’s murder in north Minneapolis for the “family sensitive” newscast, Halliday used a photograph of the victim. “It’s pretty boring stuff,” he said. “But then, I ask myself, ‘Would I want my 6-year-old getting a close-up of neighborhood kids wading in the poor guy’s blood?’ ”

At WMAR in Baltimore, where crime coverage has been moderated, news director Jack Cahalan had to suppress “gut instincts” when a fatal shootout erupted at a suburban strip mall. Instead of “going live” to the shooting at the start of his late-night newscast as rival stations did, Cahalan placed the report lower in the show, giving it 45 seconds instead of the standard three minutes.

“For awhile there, my stomach was churning, wondering whether I did the right thing,” Cahalan recalled. “But then I realized: Did the world come to an end because these two clowns got into a fatal argument? Nope.”

As a ratings tool, the “family sensitive” changes have not appeared to make much difference over the past nine months, said Braun, an executive at Frank Magid and Assoc., a top news ratings consulting firm.

At least 24 affiliates have altered their crime coverage this year. Many were clients of the ratings consulting firm Audience Research and Development Inc., whose president, Ed Bewley, said: “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that the public is against the kind of overemphasis on crime.”

When WCCO officials asked viewers in more than 100 informal meetings to elaborate on an unfinished sentence, “I hate TV news because. . .,” they were stunned at the vehemence of the replies. One angry viewer told them “anybody can buy a scanner and run around shooting crime scenes.” Another said he was afraid to leave his home to go to Twins baseball games because of what he saw on the news each night.

“They told us we weren’t giving them perspective, ‘You’re scaring us, we don’t understand what the real problem is,’ ” Lansing said.

Viewers have been increasingly barraged with half-hour reports dominated by crime since the 1970s, when ABC affiliates in New York and Philadelphia unveiled the “Action News” format, a forerunner of today’s tabloid-influenced news programs.

Created by programmers as a strong lead-in to the network’s evening news, Action News shows placed “a heavy emphasis on strong, moving visuals, rapid-paced reports--usually 90 seconds or less--and lots of crime,” said John McManus, author of “Market Driven Journalism,” a critique of the industry.

Successful in attracting audiences, the format became an industry staple. Consultants repeatedly told station executives that “if you wanted to grab an audience’s attention, nothing worked like a screaming fire truck or a police car with blinking lights,” said Jim Snyder, a former vice president for news at Post-Newsweek stations.

“It’s not that audiences are being hypocritical,” Braun said. “But there’s a genuine interest in stories about crime. People want to know what’s going on around them.”

In Los Angeles, the city that pioneered helicopter-cam coverage of police chases, that rationale has kept stations focused on crime. “Family sensitive” editing and second-guessing of crime stories has yet to gain a foothold, say local news managers.

“I’ve talked to people who work at some of these ‘family sensitive’ stations and they say they spend an awful lot of time talking about a fuzzy yardstick,” said Jose Rios, news director at KTTV-TV. “They’re concentrating more on what’s permissible than on what stories they’re doing.”

John Lippman is an independent producer who was news director of Los Angeles’ KCBS at the height of its tabloid format until he and the station parted company last year. He said he aimed his station’s broadcasts at urban and lower-income viewers whose lives are most often imperiled by crime.

Stations that devote less time to crime coverage, he insisted, give a distorted portrait of the stark reality of violence in Los Angeles and other cities.

“We followed up drive-bys and other crimes and interrupted programming for helicopter chases for a reason,” Lippman said. “We removed the middle man, the anchor, the white male expert who told people this is significant--harrumph, harrumph. By personalizing crime, we got people stirred up about it and dealing with it as an issue.”

Lippman insists he never heard complaints from minority community leaders. But television critics like Phyllis Kannis detect little altruism for minority audiences.

“To put it bluntly, local stations are exploiting the horrors of the inner city to attract their audiences,” said Kannis, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communications.

In some cities, tabloid formats have stirred considerable resentment. Earlier this year, Thomas F. Hewitt, president of the Continental Cos., owners of the Grand Bay Hotel and six other Miami hotels, pulled the cable plug on WSVN’s tabloid-style news reports to its 2,000 rooms because the crime-dominated coverage “preyed on the fears of our guests.”

In Minneapolis, black community leader Randolph Staten, a former state senator, has challenged stations to reduce excessive crime reports “because it makes our entire community look like killers.” Three years ago in Chicago, a coalition of urban church groups boycotted CBS affiliate WBBM during its crucial rating “sweeps.” Rev. Michael Pfleger, a Catholic priest who led the boycott, charged that the station’s preoccupation with crime left residents feeling hopeless, often dissuading them from taking stands against neighborhood violence.

Pfleger said he repeatedly tried to build support for anti-crime marches and other initiatives only to hear “people tell me ‘What’s the use? We can’t do anything.’ Time after time, I’d ask them if something happened to them that made them so dispirited. And it was always, ‘No, it’s what I see every night on TV.’ ”

Since then, Pfleger has seen little change on Chicago’s stations. Learning that Lansing, the man behind “family sensitive” coverage, had taken over WBBM’s news operation, he brightened. “There’s always room for hope,” he said.

Before he left for Chicago, Lansing’s co-workers decided to give him a memento.

At a going-away party, they handed Lansing a videotape of “family insensitive” footage, studded with unedited shots of some of Minneapolis’ goriest car crashes, murder scenes and police chases.

“Just so he remembers,” one co-worker said, “where he came from.”