The “Crime Beat” Questioned

For those of us with a passing interest in media accounts of crimes, reporting has long been a problem. Some journalists think they’re publicists for police departments, putting their press releases out there as gospel without the slightest interesting in questioning the facts, even when they’re absurd to the point of functional impossibility.

Other reporters have no clue what they’re writing about and spew nonsense. Still others persist in pushing nonsensical, if factually not inaccurate, information like the mandatory possible sentence available for a crime (“the defendant could be sentenced up to 1,999,999 years in prison”) even though it’s legally false. And still others write stories to promote an agenda, including allegations that are dubious and omitting facts that fail to conform to their preferred narrative.

All in all, there aren’t a lot of good crime reporters out there, and consequently, there is a lot of truly bad reporting on criminal and legal issues. One of the most offensive things a “journalist” can do is to report on a court decision without linking to the decision, leaving readers to trust their interpretation of it rather than to be able to see for themselves.

But “defund the crime beat?”

Let’s be honest: Crime coverage is terrible.

Absolutely! Totally with you.

It’s racist, classist, fear-based clickbait masking as journalism. It creates lasting harm for the communities that newsrooms are supposed to serve. And because it so rarely meets the public’s needs, it’s almost never newsworthy, despite what Grizzled Gary in his coffee-stained shirt says from his perch at the copy desk.

Whoa. Newsrooms aren’t “supposed to serve” anybody. Not the cops. Not the accused. Not the “communities,” which strikes me as missing an adjective that’s taken for granted. What the public needs is factual, accurate, complete and well-sourced information written by people who have a clue what they’re talking about.

This should be the year where we finally abolish the crime beat. Study after study shows how the media’s overemphasis on crime makes people feel less safe than they really are and negatively shapes public policy around the criminal–legal system. And study after study shows that it’s racist and inhumane.

To some extent, each of these complaints has merit, and in specific cases, a great deal of merit. The media tends to make outliers seem ubiquitous, as news is, by definition, that which doesn’t happen routinely. Dog bites man isn’t news. And then there’s the old saw, “if it bleeds, it leads.” By overemphasizing the outliers, like police wrongfully beating or killing black people, it gives rise to a public perception that it’s happening constantly, everywhere, all the time, when it’s exceptionally rare. It does happen, but nobody writes stories about ten thousand police interactions where no one was harmed. That’s not news.

While crime coverage fails to serve the public, it does serve three powerful constituencies: white supremacy, law enforcement, and newsrooms — specifically a newsroom’s bottom line.

Before you slough this off because of the hyperbole, consider that there is some fairly firm basis for this complaint.

The media tend to prioritize their relationships with law enforcement over their connections with communities impacted by state violence, overpolicing, and generations of trauma and governmental neglect. That’s because police give journalists information quickly and cultivate relationships with reporters through ride-alongs and press conferences. Police do all of this to control the narrative, set the news agenda, and stoke public fear so that law-enforcement budgets keep going up.

While there are many media outlets, more so today than in the olden days, dedicated to challenging the police narrative, most local reporters rely on a synergistic relationship with the police. They provide the information needed to report. They give tips and quotes. They let the reporters park illegally when they arrive at a crime scene. The accused rarely have spokespeople to give their side or hold a press conference immediately after a murder.

What’s worse is that journalists still defer to police, even though they know that some cops are liars. TV news in particular routinely runs crime stories that feature law enforcement as the sole source of information. This approach runs counter to everything you learn in Journalism 101 — independently verify your facts, talk to multiple sources, and don’t take the word of powerful people at face value.

An odd connection forms between reporters and cops, a reliance on friendship even when they know, or have damn good reason to know, that the cops is telling them things designed to falsely push their agenda and, well, is just a lie. They get to know who’s who, who plays it straight and who doesn’t. They get to know who’s a lying liar, but to call them a liar is to burn their personal connection and likely burn their relationship with the police department as a whole, since the cops are nothing if not defensive of each other. Want to get the poop on a big news story? You can’t if the cops don’t like you. Call them mean names and you’re dead.

But even though all of these very legitimate problems with crime and law reporting exist, is “defund the crime beat” the answer? Clearly, we need news. We may not need to foster fear of crime and loathing of black teens who are all drug dealing murderous gangsters ready to rape your daughters, but if crime is happening, are we better off not knowing about it?

The alternative is that “crime beat” reporters should be “serving” the alternative cause, report news with an anti-cop, pro-defendant, social justice bias. Of course, all the same complaints now would continue to persist, just running in the opposite direction. We need the crime beat. We need the legal beat. We just need it factual, accurate and with as little bias as possible, and that goes either way, for or against the cops. Crime beat reporters aren’t police publicists. They aren’t social justice warriors either. They’re just reporters, and we need them to be reporters.