Entertainment media are not limited to actual incidents, of course, and that freedom has allowed books, TV, and movies to make stranger abductions a dramatic staple in works ranging from tawdry thrillers to high art. The best-selling novel The Lovely Bones opens with a girl telling the reader she was murdered on December 6, 1973, “before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons . . . when people believed things like that didn’t happen.”
Politicians, newspapers, the evening news, novels, movies: They are all portraying the fantastically rare as typical, while what truly is typical goes all but unmentioned. And that’s true not only of child abductions. It applies to all crime.
Researchers have found—to no one’s surprise—that crime makes up a large and growing portion of the stories told by the news media. The numbers vary depending on the country, but most surveys show crime makes up about 10 to 30 percent of newspaper content, with quality newspapers at the low end of that range and tabloids at the top. National television news tends to carry more crime, and local TV more still. A survey of local television news in the United States by the Center for Media and Public Affairs found one story in five involved crime, making it by far the most popular subject.
Another consistent finding in the research is that the media focus heavily on individual acts and say little about broader contexts and issues. Reporters tell us about the little old lady held up at gunpoint. They don’t tell us how many little old ladies are held up at gunpoint, whether more or fewer are being held up than in the past, who is holding them up and why, or what policies might protect little old ladies. So we should be careful with our terms. The media actually pay very little attention to “crime.” It is “crimes” they can’t get enough of.
This has enormous consequences, one of which is a bias in favor of bad news that runs even deeper than the media’s usual bias in favor of bad news. Rising crime means more crimes are committed. It’s easy to reflect that— simply run more stories of people assaulted and murdered. But falling crime means fewer crimes are being committed, a trend that cannot be captured by stories of individual crimes because a crime that is not committed is not a story. And so simply because the media focus heavily on crimes while ignoring crime, rising crime will always get more far attention than falling crime.
To see how profound this bias is, imagine that a government agency releases a report on violence against intimate partners that reveals domestic assault has soared by nearly two-thirds over the past decade and is now at a record high. And now try to imagine the media completely ignoring this report. No news stories. No angry opinion columns. No feature stories examining the frightening trend. Of course, that would never happen. And yet, in December 2006, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report that showed domestic assaults in the United States had declined by nearly two-thirds in the previous decade and were now at record lows. This astonishingly good news went almost completely unreported.
An even more dramatic example occurred in Toronto, in December 2005. The day after Christmas, with bargain-seeking shoppers crowding the streets, rival gang members crossed paths. Guns flashed, bullets raced, and a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl named Jane Creba was killed. The murder would have been a shock under any circumstances, but gang-related murders committed with handguns had been surging for months, and Canada was in the midst of a federal election. Inevitably—and not unreasonably— guns, gangs, and murder dominated public debate. Politicians pounded podiums and newspaper columnists raged. But the wave of gang killings had actually peaked prior to this awful crime and, with the election over and the gunfire lessening, the issue quickly and quietly faded. Still, the violence kept ebbing. By the end of 2006, gun murders had declined 46 percent. But this went almost unmentioned in the media. There were a few stories, of course, but they referred to the decline in passing, sometimes burying it in stories about other police issues, as if it were a statistical quirk of the sort that only policy wonks would care about. And so a surge in crime that inspired a deluge of emotional stories and an impassioned national debate declined and disappeared virtually unnoticed.
The media’s skewed picture of crime also extends to which crimes get ink and airtime. Murder is always the favorite. Some studies find it accounts for as much as half of all crime reporting in some media. The Center for Media and Public Affairs’ study of local TV news in the United States found 29 percent of all crime stories were about murders, with “non-fatal shootings” coming in a distant second at 7 percent. This pattern has been found in study after study, in many countries, for decades. Even in 1950s-era Britain—when the homicide rate was vanishingly small—“homicide was by far the most common type of crime reported” in newspapers, wrote criminologist Robert Reiner.
Violence that isn’t as dramatic as murder gets less attention. Still less is given to property crime. The result is a very clear pattern in reporting. The more heinous the crime, the more attention the media give it. Of course any crime may still be reported if a politician is making an issue of it or if the victims are old people, children, or pets. Similarly, the involvement of royalty or celebrities—as either victim or culprit—will draw reporters. But generally, nonviolent crimes lose to violent, and less bloody violence loses to more bloody. Hence, in the media, murder is king.
This may seem like a perfectly reasonable way of reporting crime, because it means the more serious a crime is, the more likely it will be reported, and it’s the more serious crimes people need to hear about. This is indisputably true. And it wouldn’t be such a problem if the media balanced these stories of crimes with a lot of good analysis of crime that provided the broad picture, but they don’t. So the media tell stories of one atrocity after another—a pedophile abducts and kills a boy, a disgruntled employee kills five—that eventually come together to create an image of crime that bears little resemblance to reality.