TV newscasts no more violent than real life
May 8, 1997
A new national study reports that South Florida's TV stations spend 27.5 percent of their evening news broadcasts on crime and criminal justice, prompting the obvious question:
Is that all?
The surprise isn't how much time Miami TV devotes to murder and mayhem, but how little. The average for local 6 P.M. news broadcasts was 29.3 percent—about 30 seconds more than in the blood-spattered Dade-Broward market.
If anything, our stations show uncommon restraint. South Florida being the violent pit it is, TV news directors could easily fill the entire program with local gore. They seldom do.
Yet the University of Miami professor who directed the media study laments the findings. "It's unfortunate," said Joe Angotti, "that body-bag journalism is what local news chooses to focus on at the expense of more important stories."
Hogwash. What is unfortunate is that there's so much violence that it can't be ignored. Sadly, body-bag journalism reflects a body-bag world. We all worry some about crime because it's touched all of us.
Is it not "important" news when a two-bit shoplifter guns down a security guard in broad daylight at one of South Florida's busiest shopping malls?
How about when four members of a family, including two little children, are slaughtered in their Miramar home? Or when a father, his son and a friend are executed by intruders at an electronics warehouse in West Dade?
All that from just a week's worth of police-blotter entries. You see the problem: No other single place can compete with our volume, ferocity and weirdness of crime.
Considering the deluge, Miami's TV stations do a decent job of balancing police news with health, education and politics. Some days, it isn't easy.
Give viewers a choice between an informative story about a new low-cholesterol diet or a grisly tale about sickos stealing human heads out of crypts, and they'll dial up the cadavers every time.
For the crime-content survey, researchers in eight markets studied a half-hour of news broadcasts on four random days. Wow, that's two whole hours of TV in each city—and who's calling whom shallow?
(Incredibly, the most infamous of our local stations, WSVN-Channel 7, finished third in the body-bag derby. No talk yet of a slander suit.)
One hole in the methodology: Only English-speaking TV stations were studied. Another flaw: Only 6 P.M. broadcasts were analyzed. Many stations start the news at 5 P.M., and in-depth features often air that first hour.
That's not to say some crime stories aren't overplayed and exploited on TV, sometimes disgracefully. It's also true that some are underplayed.
In any case, there aren't many news directors who wouldn't love to get more time for school issues, medical breakthroughs, political analysis and I-Team investigations.
The problem is, news keeps happening. You can't keep it off the air.
To insinuate that crime coverage isn't serious journalism is to repudiate one of the media's essential roles. People want to be safe in their communities, and they deserve to know when they're not.
One reason that serious crime fell so sharply in New York is that the media kept a spotlight on it. As for the use of "sensational video" decried by Professor Angotti, Anthony Windes probably isn't complaining.
He's the Sears guard whose shooting was captured by a store camera. The chilling replay, widely broadcast, is what enabled police to identify the shoplifter who allegedly pulled the trigger.
How much more important can TV news be?