Journalists Under Fire for Coverage of Violent Crimes

Once again, a gunman’s rampage has scarred California, and as America tries to make sense of the violence, the news media are under fire.

Lamenting the voyeuristic coverage of an attack that shocked the nation’s conscience, some critics are blasting journalists for turning yet another gun-wielding psychopath into a household name. “These persons yearn for publicity,” writes one, “and the press, while reporting the essential facts, has a responsibility to deny them the gratification of instant celebrity.”

The complaint may sound familiar--but the year was 1975 and a New York Times columnist was angered that the Time and Newsweek covers featured Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who had tried to assassinate President Ford. From the White House and Congress came denunciations of a violence-prone media that was out of control.

It’s an old concern, yet one that has taken on new urgency in an age of 24-hour “crisis television.” While few doubt the obligation of journalists to cover breaking news, such as the recent shootings at a Granada Hills community center, many believe today’s voracious media pander to tabloid news values and spread fear--instead of providing a context for violent crimes by reporting why something frightening happened or how unusual it may be.

Journalists, critics say, are adept at pointing fingers when violence shocks America--at gun manufacturers, at Hollywood entertainment, at the Internet and video games. But they are not so eager to examine their own backyard, even as social science offers evidence that too much exposure to violent news images can lead to cynicism, a numbness to crime and even paranoia in some viewers.

“When you bombard people with frightening pictures, it creates a sense that things are out of control--a contagion of violence in the mind of people that is at odds with the reality of the world, which is that violent crime has been dropping in America,” said Robert Lifton, professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “People should feel safer. But you really wouldn’t know it from the news.”

News media violence takes up more hours than ever before: Beginning with the Gulf War, all-news cable channels and the three networks have inaugurated marathon coverage of breaking news, including crimes, that stretch sometimes for days at a time. During the recent day-trader shootings in Atlanta, for example, CNN ran live, commercial-free coverage for five straight hours.

Some defend the obligations of journalists to tell people the truth, no matter how jarring. “Much of the criticism of violence in the news is a red herring because it’s the responsibility of the news media to tell us what’s happening in the world, whether we find the news pleasant or not,” said Barbara Cochran, president of the Radio and Television News Directors Assn.

Yet others say too much coverage is dominated by an “if it bleeds, it leads” philosophy. They suggest that news directors, believing viewers are drawn to crime stories, cater to them for purely economic reasons.

Amid the debate, there is little expectation that media managers will make any sustained effort to reduce the number of crime stories they cover. Reform proposals surface from time to time, most recently when Brill’s Content, a magazine that covers the media, proposed a code of decency for reporters interviewing crime victims. Yet most local news broadcasts have enjoyed ratings success with their traditional approach, and coverage of blockbuster crime stories generally helps cable ratings too. The competitive environment makes unilateral restraint difficult.

There are, however, a handful of TV stations and newspapers trying to moderate the tone and content of their coverage. Newspapers like the Chicago Sun-Times have kept stories of high school shootings off their front pages to avoid alarming children. At KVUE-TV in Austin, Texas, news officials are in the fourth year of a program that requires crime stories to meet guidelines of relevance before they can be aired.

For the most part, however, crime news continues to dominate the media. A recent survey by the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington showed that while homicides declined by 13% in America from 1990 to 1995, the number of crime stories on the three network evening news shows skyrocketed by 336%--a figure that excludes all stories related to the O.J. Simpson case. Surveys by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Rocky Mountain Media Watch suggest that the average dose of mayhem and violence on any given night of a local TV news show ranges from 22% to 41%.

None of those studies takes into account the latest twist in news programming: that three all-news cable channels can now cover a crime story anywhere in the world nonstop, whether there is news to report or not. As TV cameras race to the scene of the next shooting, there has been a steady decline in the amount of TV foreign news coverage in this country or of national issues considered less alluring.

“In the absence of other thoughtful stories, it’s obvious that blood, guts, crime and fire will rush in to fill the void of news programming,” said Orville Schell, dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. “And this can have a demoralizing effect, not only on the audience but on the journalists who keep recycling the same news.”

While there is no direct correlation between watching crime stories on TV and the commission of a violent act, social scientists have compiled hundreds of studies over the last 40 years showing that prolonged exposure to TV violence, whether fictional or through news, can create dangerous attitudes.

“The exposure to TV violence from infancy on leads not so much to imitation as intimidation,” said George Gerbner, a professor of behavioral psychology at the Annenberg School of Communications in Philadelphia. “It leads to what we call a ‘mean world syndrome,’ a feeling of vulnerability and insecurity among people whose fears may not be justified.”

In one study, researcher L. Rowell Huesmann of the University of Michigan detailed the effect of television violence on boys who were tracked in 1960 at the age of 8 and at subsequent intervals to the age of 30. The children who watched more television violence than others in the study grew up to become more aggressive, according to the report.

Others point to data that people who are already disturbed, have poor impulse control or are angry may be inspired to mimic what they see on TV programs. Experts stress that only a handful of people may be vulnerable to such suggestion. “But even though this is a minority of people, it can have an impact on the rest of us,” said Aletha Huston, professor of child development at the University of Texas at Austin.

With distressing regularity, the same violent images fill our screens and front pages: The schoolyard vigil that continues for days after a shooting; the microphones shoved in the faces of stunned survivors, who later feel that their privacy has been violated; the macabre deja vu as TV cameras swarm to the sight of the next rampage.

In today’s superheated news marketplace, reporters often pile on at the scene of a violent crime, lending the live coverage, in particular, a grotesque, circus-like quality. At times, the media’s behavior has provoked angry reactions. In Littleton, Colo., school district leaders who were dismayed by coverage of the April massacre imposed strict guidelines on reporters covering the students’ return to Columbine High last month, including requirements that the media not show injured students and that victims’ families be treated with compassion and respect.

“There’s a potential certainly in the news media’s coverage of stories to strike fear into folks who should not be so fearful, due to situations that are, in many cases, isolated incidents,” said Eason Jordan, CNN’s president of news gathering and international networks. “If people sit around and watch violent news coverage for many hours or days on end, they won’t necessarily get an accurate picture of what’s going on in society.”

Jordan said CNN doesn’t try to scare anyone, but he conceded that hours of marathon coverage create special problems. In Granada Hills, for example, viewers shared the sense of a chaotic, unpredictable story changing by the minute. There were sporadic shots of police hunting for a suspect; viewers saw repeated shots of children being led hand-in-hand to safety, with scant news about the victims. At one point, in the absence of any hard data, a network medical expert in New York speculated on the damage that might have been done by bullets to a 5-year-old victim.

“These days, a violent story on the news has as many legs as a centipede,” said cultural critic Todd Gitlin. “The endless repetition factor keeps coverage going. The 24-hour saturation factor transforms the way violent content can fill up and dominate the news.”

But that’s just the price of doing business in a democracy, answer many media leaders. Cochran points to a 1998 survey for the Radio and Television News Directors Assn., which produced encouraging results for an industry worried about its image.

In the survey, more than 66% rated their local news shows as good or excellent, and 74% gave similar marks to the way their stations covered local crime news. However, residents of the nation’s top 25 media markets said they felt local news spent too much time covering crime.

That concern has prompted TV news directors in several markets to experiment with a less violent approach to local news coverage. While none of these so-called family-oriented stations have reported a surge in ratings, few say they are losing viewers.

“I wanted to try this new approach based on my past experiences as a TV journalist, because I was dismayed by the amount of crime news I was using to fill up broadcasts in Florida and North Carolina,” said Cathy McFeaters, news director of KVUE in Austin. “I never thought about it much because it was a formula, and after a while all the crime stories ran into each other.”

In Austin, McFeaters and others covered crime stories as before but aired them only if they met key guidelines. These included a determination that a crime story involved a threat to public safety, would affect children, required people to take action--like evacuating a neighborhood--or had a significant social impact.

In most TV markets, however, it’s business as usual.

Minutes after news broke of the Granada Hills shootings, Rabbi Lawrence Goldmark, acting director of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, got a call alerting him--from friends in Israel who had been watching the story on CNN. Rushing to the scene, he offered words of healing to the community and also got a crash course in how the media cover a crime story.

“I thought reporters out there tried to cover this with sensitivity and professionalism,” said the rabbi, who heads Temple Beth Ohr in La Mirada. “But for me the real news story is always going to be: Why did this happen? What can we learn from it? And if it’s going to happen again, how can a community protect itself?”

Ultimately, he added, solutions rest with the American people. “If TV stations were to be inundated by viewers saying, ‘We don’t want all these crime stories!’ they would stop. In a democracy, the people have the final vote--with their remotes.”