Page 505 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Sensat onal sm, Fear Monger ng, and Tablo d Med a

CrimE anD FEar-mongEring
Even a casual news consumer will not have missed the flood of stories about
scary criminals, unsafe streets, and what some media watch groups term sim-
ply “mayhem.” Local news usually garners the worst of these criticisms, but the
stunning increase in such visceral fare on the flagship network news programs
is a measure of the transformations of news in the corporate age. Long-time
journalism educator W. Lance Bennett notes that during the 1990s there was a
precipitous rise in the number of crime stories that aired annually on the three
network evening news programs on NBC, CBS, and ABC. From 1990 to 1998,
the number of crime stories rose from 542 to 1392. The increased popularity
of news about violent crime occurred at a time when the actual levels of most
violent crimes in American society had dropped significantly. This disjunc-
ture between the news reality and the social reality of crime is also reflected
in the reporting of homicides. Writing in the Washington Post, Richard Morin
noted that between 1993 and 1996, the number of murder stories increased by
700 percent. During this same period, the actual murder rate dropped 20 per-
cent. Robert Entman and others have also demonstrated the disproportionate
number of African American criminal perpetrators featured in scary mug shots
on late-night local news.

TEChnoLogy, nEw mEDia, anD sEnsaTionaLism
The greater speeds with which audiences can be measured have increased
the tendencies for news outlets in all formats to play to fear, outrage, and the
vicarious story. Now that reporters are also racing to get their stories on the In-
ternet, they are seeking as many “hits” as possible, and computer technology al-
lows those hits to be counted and reported instantaneously. Reporters and their
owners are finding out immediately which stories, and which aspects of those
stories, are getting attention. As much as the professional ethics codes hold that
journalists should not pander to lurid curiosity, as the media converge and move
toward the Web, such tendencies continue. As visual images augment online
content, they also attract browsers with stories that satisfy the curious and ex-
pose the private.

imagEry anD sounD
Many critics find a connection between the visual aspects of news reporting
and the tendency toward sensationalism. Here too, visual imagery has long been
employed as an attention-grabbing device. There has always been an interest in
using type and woodprints to highlight print and newspaper stories. When the
half-tone process was invented in 1880, photographs were easily inserted into
newspapers and it became much easier to arouse the reader’s emotions and curi-
osity. Lurid photos of condemned criminals being executed made the front page.
With the advent of radio broadcasting, announcers read newspaper copy over
the air and learned to use their voices with the microphone to enhance the de-
livery of the news. Reporting during World War II, legendary CBS broadcast