 | Grand Illusion Samuel Goodstein |
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Someone once described our campus as "one square mile surrounded by reality," and this is true for a host of reasons, one of which is the way Michigan students get their news. While the key sources of news for University students probably include The New York Times, National Public Radio, CNN or the Daily, out there in reality most people get their news from a combination of local newspapers, the networks and local TV newscasts. Anyone who does watch local TV news, especially in urban areas, knows that it is typically dominated by crime stories or reports of absurd happenings; many local stations devote about ten minutes to the local crime/freak-show, and two minutes to news before moving on to weather and sports. This summer, on my local newscast, before I could hear about Congress passing health care reform I had to watch three separate violent crime stories, a story about a house in Rhode Island falling into the water (nobody was hurt) and a story about a man who ran through the zoo naked, frightening a group of children.
While all polls indicate that Americans dislike unnecessary violence in their local newscasts, the Nielson ratings tell a different story: Local stations with high levels of graphic violence get the top ratings. While psycho-analysts may attribute this paradox to the fact that we want what we detest, I think there is a more simple explanation: We hardly have a choice. Competitive local stations appeal to the lowest common denominator - senseless crime that has no impact on the community but looks really gory on camera - because it is an easy way to get good ratings.
Furthermore, crime is easy to report. Every TV station has a police scanner, so they can immediately find out when and where crimes have occurred, and it takes minimal effort to put together a good, even sensational, crime story. Key characters are easy to get on the air, and easy to interview: Talk to a few cops, talk to the victim, the victim's family and friends, and if you are a lucky reporter you can even talk to the suspect and his or her friends and family. It all makes for a nice, quick story that can be prepared by 5 p.m.
"So what?" you ask. If the bulk of the population gets its news from a source that stresses crime over civic issues, violence over real community developments and freak occurrences over politics, this can easily corrode participatory democracy. Even worse, the focus on crime distorts reality. Nationally, and in Michigan, crime has been going down; however coverage of crime is going up and fear of crime is going through the roof. Coincidence? Maybe, but I doubt it.
Fortunately, as reported on NPR, there is a station in Austin, Texas that is quietly revolutionizing the way local stations report the news, and maybe this revolution will spread. KVUE, the ABC affiliate in Austin, has decided to cut gratuitous crime out of their broadcasts, and focus on issues that really impact the community. This doesn't mean that KVUE will never report a crime, only that they will hold crime stories up to the same standards that other potential stories face. In other words, just because a crime happens doesn't make it news. Specifically, KVUE holds each story up to five criteria: Is it an immediate threat to public safety? Is it a threat to children? Do viewers need to take action (this could include anything from leaving town to voting for or against a certain person or ballot question)? Does it have an impact on the community (the community could be Austin or it could be the world community)? And is it a crime prevention issue (trials are included here)? Using these criteria, KVUE can still cover crime without turning the news into a laundry list of murders, robberies and oddities. For example, KVUE decided against running a story about a triple murder committed after a fight between a group of drunk men in a barn outside of Austin, while its main competitor ran it as the lead story.
It does not surprise me that KVUE is the ratings leader in Austin; only that more local stations have yet to catch on. While critics claim that KVUE is violating journalistic ethics by filtering out what they view as "bad" news, the fact is that every news organization must use some set of critereia in determining what to run - some organizations use better criteria than others.
I spent the summer in Washington, D.C., a city with perhaps the most interesting municipal issues in America. Almost every time I turned on the local news, crime was the lead story. Certainly the fact that parts of Washington are more dangerous than anywhere in the world is newsworthy, but each individual crime is not. Once, a murder got more time than the city's declaration that the drinking water was unsafe. Only the Olympics supplanted crime - and the most covered story in Atlanta was the bomb that went off in the Olympic Village.
- Sam Goodstein can be reached via e-mail at faygo@umich.edu.