Juvenile Crime Stories Use Police Blotter Without Comment from Suspects

Newspaper Research Journal, Fall 2004 by Simon, James, Hayes, Sean

More than 20 years ago, in her classic book "Crime News and the Public," Doris Graber offered a comprehensive study of the assembly line approach used by many news organizations to generate stories involving crime and violence. She concluded:

The present crime and justice format allows reporters assigned to the police beat to take police blotter news and, with minimal effort, shape it into a steady stream of "newsworthy" stories. The public wants to be entertained, primarily, and not educated and prodded into social action.1

In the two decades since Graber's seminal work, much has changed in the newspaper world. How about crime coverage and, more specifically, coverage of juvenile crime? Are young people accused of committing crimes treated evenhandedly by the press? This study examines all of the stories on juvenile justice issues in the three largest newspapers in a state, over a three-month period, to see if there is evidence of reporters going beyond the traditional police blotter approach. If only police are quoted and suspects are not given a chance to defend themselves, what does that say about the goal of newspapers to present both sides of a story?

Literature Review

News media coverage of crime has been faulted on many levels. Crime stories are seen as often focusing on single, isolated events instead of studying underlying causes or providing interpretive analysis.2 Such stories are criticized for exaggerating and sensationalizing violence and fostering stereotypes by over-representing and under-representing certain ethnic, gender and age groups.3 In the 1990s, the news media were seen as preoccupied with crime at a time when the crime rate was declining.4 In summarizing academic studies, Dorfman concluded:

The problem is not the inaccuracy of individual stories, but that the cumulative choices of what is included in the news-or not included-presents the public with a false picture of higher frequency and severity of crime than is actually the case.5

Researchers have long recognized that reporters, in constructing crime stories, follow certain patterns in deciding what sources to quote. Sources with economic or political power, like police, are more likely to be quoted or to influence news.6 Official sources, such as police and government officials, are more likely to be quoted because they are easy to interview7 and because reporters feel official sources have important things to say.8 Information from government officials is more likely to be seen as factual.9 Police have been the traditional source for most crime news. In "The Social Creation of Crime News," Sherizan writes that police

...supply reporters with a constant stream of usable crime, and this information, fitting into the work requirements of the reporters, becomes the raw materialfrom which crime news is written.10

As a result, the "police blotter" approach to crime reporting, in which a reporter simply rewrites items from the official police log and presents them as news, has endured despite widespread criticism. In their journalism call-to-arms, "The News About News: American Journalism In Peril," Leonard Downie, Jr., and Robert G. Kaiser warn:

Much bad journalism is just lazy and superficial. Newspapers fill columns with fluffy trivia and rewrites of press releases and the police blotter.11

While the assembly line approach is efficient, the short stories that result are often based on a single source and can present a narrow view of reality. Editor Jane Amari writes:

Our main source for these stories are police and court officers. Rarely do we get the side of the accused-even when attorneys permit interviews. And victims frequently want to remain in the background.12

About half of all coverage of children is related to crime and violence.13 When it comes to juvenile justice issues, the news media's routine approach to handling crime news is often combined with a sensational tone. This "wild in the streets" approach can focus on super predators or "fallen angels/little monsters," even though juvenile crime arrest trends have been stable or declining for 10 years.14 In 1998,62 percent of respondents in one poll said juvenile crime was on the rise; in reality, violent crime by youth was at its lowest point in the 25-year history of the National Crime Victimization Survey.15

This study focuses on two research questions:

RQ1:

Given past criticism of limited sourcing on police stories, what sources do present-day reporters rely on in writing juvenile justice stories?

RQ2:

When reporters go beyond the police blotter and write longer stories, are they more likely to balance the traditional comments from police with comments from juvenile defendants and outside expert sources?

Methodology

The study focused on stories published in Connecticut's three largest newspapers-the Hartford Courant (weekday circulation 207,000), the New Haven Register (100,000) and the (Bridgeport) Connecticut Post (77,000)-between Jan. 1, 2002, and March 31, 2002. The study's design was based on a census of all newspaper stories, not a random sample, in the three-month period.