News coverage of crime in America is often influenced by historical narratives that have portrayed communities of color as threatening and dangerous, two veteran journalists said.
“While we as journalists often think of our work as neutral, the evidence is showing that the impacts on the communities and on the people in the stories are not actually neutral,” said Cassie Owens, news voices program manager at Free Press.
Owens, a longtime Philadelphia journalist who advises reporters on how to better serve Black communities, addressed reporters with Associated Press national correspondent Gary Fields at the Crime Coverage Summit hosted by the Radio Television Digital News Association and the National Press Foundation.
The disproportionate portrayal of communities of color, Owens said, dates to slavery when early news reports of slave revolts characterized Black people as “dangerous, brutish, unsafe, violent.”
“And if we’re talking about where, at least on this soil, some of the crime coverage was born, we have to tell that story,” Owens said. “And we also have to tell that story thinking about what those narratives do over time.”
Fields, an award-winning criminal justice reporter, urged journalists to go beyond initial police narratives and report the stories from the communities where they emerge.
Gary Fields and Cassie Owens, Photo by: BP Miller/Chorus Photography
“When I started this, we took police reports and statements from lawyers and from prosecutors as the gospel,” Fields said. “If you went and looked at the arrest book and somebody had been booked, you just assume, ‘Yeah, well, they got the right person, they must be guilty.’ We took it as the gospel because we didn’t think anybody had ulterior motives and we weren’t asking the next question…
“So historically, buying into the narrative that the police and law enforcement had always put out there didn’t make sense,” Fields said. “Personally, it didn’t make sense either because by the time I wrote my first crime story, I’d had a gun pulled on me by cops twice, once for murder… I didn’t do it. And the second thing was for an armed robbery that hadn’t occurred. Yeah, figure that one out.”
Fields also urged journalists to acknowledge their own life experiences and how those influence the work.
“The first thing is journalism is not objective,” Fields said. “The way we do our jobs should be objective, but we carry all of our life’s experiences, where we’re from, who we’ve been with, who we hang out with, what we’ve seen… And all of us can sit back and say we’ve got editors who have actually seen things and have different perspectives and think that a story is a good one when you think it’s a piece of crap. That’s because subjectively we carry our life’s experiences with us.”
Access the full transcript here.
The 2024 Crime Coverage Summits are sponsored by Arnold Ventures. NPF and RTDNA are solely responsible for the content.
