Carroll Bogert leads the Marshall Project, a nonprofit focused solely on criminal justice reporting. She spoke to over 80 television news directors and newsrooms confronting problems with TV news crime coverage. [Transcript | Video]

5 takeaways:

➀ How media cover crime truly matters, historically and today. “Criminal justice advocates think and talk all the time about what local broadcasters are doing, and feel that there are few elements in American society that are more determinative of what happens in criminal justice policy, than what you all put on the air,”  Bogert told a conference of local TV news directors and senior executives. “And if you feel sometimes like your job doesn’t matter or it isn’t what it once was, just remember you really, really make a difference.”

➁ The attribution “police said” reflects the dependency on police sources that is the crux of the coverage dilemma. “The criminal justice system starts before the police, with a school-to-prison pipeline, and it cycles through a court system and prisons and re-entry. There’s a lot to cover in criminal justice, but in covering crime, the institution of the police is so overwhelmingly important,” Bogert said. “How can you do your jobs without information from the police? And what do you do when the police aren’t telling you the truth?”

➂ The institutions of the police and the press were born together in the 1830s and have remained mostly codependent since. “We have to recognize that our business is really intertwined in and, in some ways, codependent with the institution of the police, and it always has been that way. I think it’s necessary to know that the media played such an extremely problematic role in lynchings in America.”

➃ Public perceptions of crime do not match reality – and media coverage has played a large role in that.

From 2019 to 2022, media mentions of shootings were not correlated with the actual number of shootings. Distorting factors include:

• the way police report crime to attract media coverage
• the media’s focus on the most heinous crimes – which are a tiny percentage of all crimes
• politicians’ use of crime to boost their electoral prospects and drive media coverage
• the politicization of media outlets

➄ News organizations are adopting a variety of policies to try to improve coverage. Some are attempts to balance the “police said” side of the narrative, Bogert said. Other changes include:

• Dropping coverage of less-serious crime. For example, the Dayton Daily News adopted a policy of not reporting on financial crimes with less than $10,000 in damages.
• Not running police mugshots, or when they do, instituting a process by which a person can get the mugshot taken down, like the Boston Globe.
• Only covering cases worth following.

“Are we only going to report the crime or are we going to keep going through the arraignment, through an investigation, through the trial, and even what happens to the victims and the family members of the perpetrator, or the person who’s convicted? It’s a very, very, very long tail that comes after that sometimes extremely quick moment of a crime. How much are you willing to devote yourself to covering the downstream effects of a single crime?”

Crime Coverage Summit 2023: Beyond ‘If It Bleeds, It Leads’ was sponsored by Arnold Ventures and hosted by NPF and RTDNA. NPF is solely responsible for this content.