NCJ Number
75150
Date Published
1977
Length
30 pages
Annotation
Empirical data are used to test a sociological model of patterns of crime news coverage by newspapers and television.
Abstract
The proposed model of news coverage holds that news is a product of socially determined notions of who and what is important to the public, notions which in turn produce the organizational structures that routinize news collection; events falling outside of the focus of the news collecting organization tend to be ignored. Data to test this model were gathered from a 1-year content analysis of six daily newspapers, one weekly paper, and nightly newscasts on three national and two local television stations. Findings tend to support the model by showing that crime news receives ample coverage and display compared to other types of news, based upon current notions about audience news preference. Crime news does not, however, prevent political news from expanding at times of major political activity; however, when contractions in political news occur, crime news expands. Crime news was found to distort perceptions of the nature and rate of crime by giving disproportionate emphasis to street crime compared to white-collar crime. There is substantial similarity in the types of news presented by various newspapers and television sources, along with the frequency with which different news areas are covered. This suggests a common view throughout the news media of the kind of news preferred by the public. The beat system of news collection was found to encourage coverage of crime news readily available from regular police sources. The display features of news varied widely among the sources examined. This implies that once the news data are in the organizational 'pipeline,' the preferences of organizational personnel and their perceptions of audience preferences affect the nature of the news display. Tabular data and footnotes are provided.