I finally found it. The media delibertly OVER REPORTS CRIME especially black/youth crime........The results of this study are really damning.
Finding #1: The news media report crime, especially violent crime, out of proportion to its actual occurrence.
Studies of newspapers and television identified three clear patterns. First, and most consistent over time, is that newspapers and television emphasize violent crime. Second, the more unusual the crime, the greater the chance it will be covered. Third, the rate of crime coverage increased while real crime rates dropped. While all media emphasize violence in their news, newspapers do it to a lesser degree than network television, which does it less than local TV news.25 There are fewer studies of Spanish language newspapers and television news broadcast in the US, but those that exist also demonstrate an emphasis on crime consistent with studies of English-language US news.26,27,28,29,30
Violent Crime Dominates Crime Coverage. Crime is often the dominant topic on local television news31 , network news32 , and TV newsmagazines.33 On network newscasts, crime and violence are covered more than any other topic on the news. Crime is a newspaper staple as well. When the news media cover crime, they cover little other than violent crime.34 While crimes against property occupy most of law enforcement’s attention, violent crimes occupy television producers, newspaper editors, and reporters’.35 In general, TV crime reporting is the inverse of crime frequency. That is, murder is reported most often on the news though it happens the least.36 As we discuss later in this report, this is not surprising since homicide is a crime with much greater consequences than property crimes and embodies many aspects reporters seek in a "good story."
The more unusual the crime or violence, the more likely it is to be covered. In some studies, the number of victims was the strongest predictor of whether or not a crime would be covered.37 Other factors that increase the likelihood of a homicide being reported in the news are multiple victims, multiple offenders, an unusual method, a White victim, a child, elderly, or female victim, or occurrence in an affluent neighborhood.38,39 For example, a study of five years of homicide coverage in the Los Angeles Times from 1990 through 1994 found that the least common homicides received the most coverage.40 That is, homicides between strangers and interracial homicides received more coverage when, in reality, most murder victims in Los Angeles County were killed by someone they knew and someone of the same race.
The disproportionate coverage of homicide was also prevalent in television news. For example, Rocky Mountain Media Watch’s one-day snapshot of local television news in 55 markets around the country on February 26, 1997, the Kaiser Family Foundation analyses of national television news in 1996, and Gilliam et al.’s studies of the evening news on KABC-TV in Los Angeles from 1993 to 1994 were remarkably consistent. All three found that homicides made up more than a quarter of the crimes reported on the evening news (27% - 29%) while from one- to two-tenths of one percent of all arrests in those years was for a homicide. On one Los Angeles local station this amounted to 14 homicide stories for every homicide committed.41 As the authors note, "the seriousness and newsworthiness of murder cannot be denied, but the level of ‘distortion’ is impressive." Other violent crime categories were also portrayed out of proportion to their actual share of arrests.
Crime coverage has increased while real crime rates have fallen. Overall the rate of crime coverage in the news did not reflect crime trends. For example, one of the few studies of newsmagazines found that increases in crime reporting in Time magazine reflected increases in crime during 1975 and 1979.42 But it also found a 55% increase in crime coverage in Time from 1979 through 1982 when the actual crime rate increased by only 1%.
On network television news, crime coverage doubled from 1992 to 1993, from 830 to 1,698 stories. This made crime the leading TV news topic for the first time since 1987. The coverage continued rising, reaching 1,949 stories in 1994 and 2,574 in 1995, more than triple the total recorded in 1992. Crime news peaked in 1995 primarily because of the O.J. Simpson trial coverage, but never dropped to its pre-O.J. levels.43 From 1990 through 1999, Center for Media and Public Affairs researchers catalogued 135,449 stories on ABC, CBS, and NBC evening newscasts. Crime was the biggest topic of the decade with 14,289 crime stories. Crime news declined for the first time in 2000, dropping 39% from the previous year, but remains the third most frequent topic on network news.44
Local television news has not been monitored for as long as the networks. However, several studies done in the mid-1990’s by Rocky Mountain Media Watch (RMMW) provide similar evidence for local TV news.45 RMMW volunteers collect late night news broadcasts from local TV stations on the same night around the country. All RMMW studies show high levels of crime reporting, so much so that RMMW created a measure dubbed the "mayhem index" to account for local TV news attention to crime, violence and disaster coverage. In every year examined, crime stories dominate the local TV newscasts, and violent crime, particularly murder, dominates the crime stories. For example, in 1997, RMMW found that crime topped the list of subjects covered on local evening news, was one-third of all local news stories, and appeared three times as much as the next closest subject. RMMW suggests that crime coverage not only persists out of proportion to actual crime, but that it also uses up time that could be devoted to other important topics.
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