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In an environment in which fear of youth crime and actual youth crime are so out of sync, policies affecting young people are bound to be impacted. Since 1992, 47 states have made their juvenile justice systems more punitive by eroding confidentiality protections or making it easier to try juveniles as adults. In one estimate, more than 200,000 youths were prosecuted in adult court in America in 1998.
Americans are also more likely to exaggerate the threat of victimization by minorities. Twice as many White Americans believe they are more likely to be victimized by a minority than a White, despite the fact that Whites are three times more likely to be victimized by Whites than by minorities.
The public depends on the media for its pictures of crime. Three quarters (76%) of the public say they form their opinions about crime from what they see or read in the news, more than three times the number who state that they get their primary information on crime from personal experience (22%). In a Los Angeles Times poll, 80% of respondents stated that the media's coverage of violent crime had in-creased their personal fear of being a victim.
These survey results are consistent with communications research that confirms that the news media largely determine what issues we collectively think about, how we think about them and what kinds of policy alternatives are considered viable. News portrayals of juvenile justice issues are significant for how they influence policymakers and the public regarding what should be done to ensure public safety. The public and policy makers do not consider issues unless they are visible, and they are not visible unless the news brings them to light.
Most people have little or no personal experience with juvenile crime since adults commit most of the crime in the nation: adults commit about 89% of all crimes cleared by arrest.
The public depends on the media even more for its pictures of crime done by or to minority youth, since most of the public doesn't have personal experience with it. Eighty-six percent of White homicide victims are killed by other Whites and, overall, Whites are three times as likely to be victimized by other Whites as by minorities. There is a very small likelihood that a White adult will have the unfortunate opportunity to form an opinion about Black youth violence based on personal experience. Consequently, America's dominant voting and opinion setting block -- its White adult population -- simply must rely on the news to explain minority youth crime to them.
The news media should help as many citizens as possible make sense of the world around them. But does the current approach to covering youth and crime maximize public understanding of reality? What information on youth and crime does the American public get from the news? In view of the powerful impact news coverage of crime has on public opinion and the dependence of most Americans on the media for depictions of crime, there are several important questions we have about the accuracy of the picture Americans are receiving from the news media:
Once we had summarized and condensed the findings about news content, we compared those findings to crime trends reported by law enforcement agencies. For example, if studies of the news showed an ever-larger proportion of the "news hole" (the amount of newspaper or television time devoted to news) occupied by violent crime, was that simply a reflection of actual increases in violent crime during the same time period? According to the best scientific analyses of media content, is the news providing an accurate reflection of crime trends? We ascertained whether the studies themselves made the relevant comparisons to crime trends, and, if they did not, we collected the appropriate crime data to compare to the content of the news.
The studies we surveyed covered a range of media -- local and network television, newspapers, and broadcast and print news magazines -- from 1910 through 2001. Most studies analyzed newspapers (N=55), followed by local television (N=25). Nineteen studies analyzed network television news. Only three studies analyzed print news magazines and two analyzed the content of TV news magazine programs. (The numbers add to more than 77 because several studies analyzed more than one medium).
Furthermore, the studies show that crime is depicted as a series of distinct events unrelated to any broader context. Most studies that examine race and crime find that the proportion of crime committed by people of color (usually African Americans) is over-reported and that Black victims are under-represented. Other studies find that crimes committed by people of color are covered in proportion with arrest rates, but that crimes committed by Whites are under-covered.
Violent crime dominates crime coverage. Crime is often the dominant topic on local television news, network news, and TV news magazines. In general, TV crime reporting is the inverse of crime frequency. That is, murder is reported most often on the news though it happens the least. Several analyses of the evening news found that, although homicides made up from one to two-tenths of one percent of all arrests, homicides made up more than a quarter (27% - 29%) of the crimes reported on the evening news. While it is to be expected that a homicide will receive more media attention than a petty theft, overcoverage of violent crime can give viewers the sense that the world is a more dangerous place than it actually is.
The more unusual the crime or violence, the more likely it is to be covered. Factors that increase the likelihood of a homicide being reported in the news are multiple victims, multiple offenders, an unusual method, a White victim, a child, elderly, or female victim, or occurrence in an affluent neighborhood. One study found that the least frequent murders--homicides between strangers and interracial homicides--received more coverage when, in reality, most people were murdered by someone they knew and someone of the same race.
Crime coverage has increased while real crime rates have fallen. Overall the rate of crime coverage in the news did not reflect crime trends. Nationally, crime dropped by 20% from 1990 to 1998 while network TV showed an 83% increase in crime news. While homicide coverage was increasing on network news -- a 473% jump from 1990 to 1998 -- homicides were down 32.9% during the same time period. (See Figure 1).
Invisible Black victims. Six out of seven studies that clearly identify the race of victims found more attention was paid to White victims than to Black victims. Homicides of White victims not only resulted in more articles, but also longer articles than homicides of Black victims. This prompted one researcher to coin the term "worthy victims" to describe the greater coverage received by White crime victims compared to people of color.
Visible Black suspects. Overall, while the coverage of perpetrators of color is out of balance with actual crime trends, it is less so than the coverage of minority victims. In nine of twelve (75%) studies, minorities were overrepresented as perpetrators of crime. Some studies found distinct disparities, while others found perpetrators of color represented in numbers that matched their local arrest rates, but found Whites underrepresented.
For example, a study of murder coverage in Indianapolis newspapers found that the percentage of articles about Black suspects reflected the percentage of Blacks arrested for murder (60% and 61%, respectively), but if the suspect was Black, the average article length was longer than for a White suspect. Close looks at local TV news in a large urban center found disparities as well. Blacks were 22% more likely to be shown on local TV news in Los Angeles committing violent crime than nonviolent crime, while according to police statistics, Blacks were equally likely to be arrested for violent crime and nonviolent crime. Likewise, Hispanics were 14% more likely to be depicted as committing violent crime than a nonviolent crime, whereas Hispanics were 7% more likely to be arrested for a violent crime than a nonviolent crime. Some might argue that this is simply because violent crime is more newsworthy than non-violent crime. But Whites were 31% more likely to be depicted committing a nonviolent crime than a violent crime, whereas Whites were only 7% more likely to be arrested for a nonviolent crime than a violent crime. While Blacks and Hispanics were over-represented as violent offenders, Whites were underrepresented as violent offenders on the same evening news. In addition, researchers found that when stories featured a Black perpetrator, reporters included sources hostile to the perpetrator half the time, whereas with White perpetrators, reporters included hostile sources 25 percent of the time.
How are African Americans depicted in crime stories? In his extensive work on portrayals of African Americans on local television news, Robert Entman documents that Blacks are most likely to be seen in television news stories in the role of criminal, victim, or demanding politician. Black suspects were less likely to be identified by name than White suspects; were not as well dressed as White suspects; and were more likely to be shown physically restrained than Whites. In sum, Entman concluded that Black suspects were routinely depicted as being poor, dangerous, and indistinct from other non-criminal Blacks.
Interracial crime. Our nation has an ugly history of treatment of interracial crime, dating from slavery through the "Jim Crow" era to the well-documented fact that today Blacks have a higher risk of receiving the death penalty for killing Whites than any other victim-offender racial mix. That history is reflected in public opinion polling on race and crime that shows that Whites overestimate their likelihood of being victimized by minorities by three to one. Studies of TV news coverage of crime in Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Chicago found that interracial crime was substantially more likely to be reported than its actual percentage of crime statistics would predict. These findings are disturbing since people of all races are far more likely to be killed by someone of the same race.
Summary. While every content analysis of media coverage of crime by and against people of color does not show disparate coverage, a clear majority of the research reveals a disturbing pattern of dispropor-tionate coverage. Consequently, it is likely that most Americans form an erroneous picture of which groups are violent and who suffers most often from crime and violence. In particular, the absence of Black victims, coupled with the repeated presence of Black suspects across different sources of news, reinforces stereotypes about African Americans as a group audiences should fear.
News involving youth is violent. Stories about youth in newspapers and on television news are scarce. When they do appear in the news, youth usually are in stories about education or violence. Relatively few youth are arrested each year for violent crimes, yet the message from the news is that this is a common occurrence.
One study of newspaper coverage of youth in Minnesota concluded that youth "are presented as inevitably bad, and, if left untreated, they will inevitably go wrong." An analysis of Hawaii's major dailies over 10 years showed a 30-fold increase in coverage of youth crime, despite declining rates of youth crime. An analysis examining 840 newspaper stories and 109 network news segments in 1993 showed that 40% of all newspaper stories on children were about violence, as were 48% of network television news, whereas nominal attention was given to topics of family, health, or economic concerns. There was more overall coverage of crime and violence than of all other policy issues combined. In a later study that examined 3,172 randomly selected stories on youth in one year of the Los Angeles Times, Sacramento Bee, and San Francisco Chronicle, the newspapers focused largely on two topics: education and violence. No other topic rated even a third as much attention. Education stories comprised 26% of all stories involving youth. The authors concluded that this is appropriate since the vast majority of youth between the ages of 5 and 17 attend school and about half continue after high school. But violence stories made up 25% of all youth coverage, when only three young people in 100 perpetrated or became victims of violence.
The circumstances in which youth are seen on television news are similar. A study of youth on local television news in 1993 examined 214 hours of local television news broadcast over 11 days on 26 stations through-out California. More than two-thirds of violence stories involved youth while more than half of all stories that included youth involved violence. One out of every two (53%) TV news stories concerning children or youth involved violence, while California crime data show that one out of every 50 (2%) young people in California were either victims or perpetrators of violence in 1993. Nearly seven in 10 news stories (68%) on violence in California involved youth, whereas youth made up 14.1% of violence arrests in California that year. (See Figure 2) 
By contrast, young people had to perform extraordinary feats to appear on local television news in non-violence-related circumstances. When youth crime receives a far larger share of all crime coverage than youths actually commit, and when youth crime coverage dramatically increases while actual youth crime is decreasing, the public that relies on media coverage as its primary source of information about youth crime is misinformed.
Youth of color fare worse than their white counterparts. The one study that examined youth portrayals in magazines had the most to say about race. A qualitative analysis of all cover stories in Time and Newsweek between 1946-1995 determined that the term "young Black males" became synonymous with the word "criminal" during the late 1960's when Blacks were struggling for equality. A March 1965 Newsweek article was the first to connect crime with Black crime. In later stories in the 1970's, both Time and Newsweek portrayed crime as "largely perpetrated by 'young Black males'". Later, Hispanic males were added to the picture.
A study of youth crime portrayals in the New York Times found that Black or Latino youth were never quoted directly, while White youth were quoted in all five stories in which they appeared. Furthermore, defense attorneys for White youth were quoted 13 times, but attorneys for youth of color only twice.
Crime news is where all youth are most likely to be seen on TV news, but youth of color appear in crime news more often than White youth--52% and 35%, respectively. White youth were present more often in health or education stories (13%) than were youth of color (2%).
Youth victims & perpetrators. Only a few studies distinguished between youth victims and perpetrators. One found that homicide victims under age 15 received more coverage in the Los Angeles Times than would be expected based on the frequency of homicides in that group. Researchers examining the San Francisco Chronicle found more depictions of youth perpetrators than youth victims, despite crime data that show three crimes committed by adults against teens for every violent offense committed by youth under 18. In another examination of the Los Angeles Times in 1997, researchers found that nearly one in four murder suspects (23.9%) whose ages were identified in the Times were youth, while only one in six homicide arrestees (15.8%) in Los Angeles were youth that year.
Violence against youth is underreported. Two studies assessed whether crimes against young people were being covered; both studies found that crimes perpetrated by adults against youth are underreported. Several other studies that examined depictions of youth in the news generally did not detect substantial coverage of youth as victims of violence.
The relative lack of reporting on violence against youth can be juxtaposed with the overreporting of homicide by youth as compared to adults. In a comparison of youth portrayals in 327 stories from the 1997 Los Angeles Times (Orange County edition) to crime reports from the Los Angeles Police Department, researchers found youth homicides were nearly three times more likely to be reported in the Los Angeles Times, despite the fact that adults commit and are victims of far more murders. The authors conclude that the Times' coverage scapegoats youth, since they commit far fewer crimes than adults.
Journalists ponder why. There are reasons the coverage looks as it does. One is that crime news is easy -- everyone knows what it looks like, how to gather it, and how to report it. Some journalists argue that audiences want news about violence, though most polls dispute that argument. Another reason is that news is a business, and reporters, producers, and editors have learned to choose the news they believe will draw the most attractive audience for advertisers.
The study of Denver's "Summer of Violence" offers some insight into newsroom decision-making about which homicides warrant coverage. After interviewing editors, producers, and reporters, the researcher concludes that, in covering Denver's "Summer of Violence" in 1993, journalists viewed these mostly White, middle class victims killed by minority youth through a predominantly White middle class lens. Denver Post reporter Steven Lipscher said, for example:
Take a look at our editors over there. Take a look at the news editors at the TV stations. Most of them are White middle class. Most of them are men but that doesn't make a whole lot of difference here. They live in these nice middle class neighborhoods and when those neighborhoods start having random crime...and it gets close to the suburbs or even in the suburbs where these news editors live, you know that deeply troubles them. When the crime was centered solely on the inner city if we had minority editors, people who lived in the inner city, we might have covered it. But we didn't and we still don't. Inner city crime is not nearly as shocking as suburban crime and the only reason why is look at who is writing the stories and look at who is assigning the stories.
The White, middle class lens means that some murders are more important than others, as explained by this Rocky Mountain News reporter:
There are homicides and then there are homicides on the police beat. There are homicides I can work hard on and only get this much into the paper. And then there are the kind that all you have to do is mention to the editor, "Gotta former district attorney who just killed his wife," and we're all over it...And as a colleague of mine once said, he had this theory that there were misdemeanor murders. That's not a theory I subscribe to, but he had a point. Obviously, there are some murders that don't count as much as others. A misdemeanor homicide according to Tony was typically a drug dealer [who] wipes out another drug dealer in an alley somewhere over a business deal gone bad. That is considered a low interest homicide (Emphasis in original).Ultimately, individual news workers make decisions about what to include in the news of the day based on whether they personally care about the story. Reporters, editors, and producers have finely honed internalized mechanisms that are triggered by their personal values and emotional responses, tempered by news judgement, experience, and expectations of audience response. Standard selection criteria for news stories -- controversy, conflict, novelty, proximity, significance, timeliness, visual appeal, practicality -- are processed through the personal filters of journalists.
Each study's findings, taken alone, may not be cause for alarm. After all, crime is a serious problem that demands news attention and political action.
But if news audiences are taking the crime coverage at face value, they are accepting a serious distortion. They are likely to believe that most crime is extremely violent and that perpetrators are Black and victims, White. If news audiences have little contact with young people, they are likely to believe that youth are dangerous threats, in part because there are so few other representations of youth in the news to the contrary.
Since every news outlet can't cover every crime, the question then becomes, how should editors, producers, and reporters choose which crimes to cover? How can the picture be made more accurate? How can print and broadcast journalists make choices that minimize the distortions documented by researchers since 1910? How can their cumulative choices better reflect the crime and violence they cover? When they make those choices, how can the media add more context to crime coverage so as to improve the viewers' understanding of the causes and solutions to violent crime? And what, if anything, can the public do to get more accurate information in the news?
Vincent Schiraldi is founder and president of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice and its research and public policy arm, the Justice Policy Institute. He has a 20-year history of research, public education, and direct services in the criminal/juvenile justice field. Mr. Schiraldi served on the California Blue Ribbon Commission on Inmate Population Management, the National Criminal Justice Commission, and the San Francisco Juvenile Probation Commission and as an advisor to the California Commission on the Status of African American Men. His research findings and commentaries have been covered in print and on electronic media throughout the country including Nightline, the Today Show, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, evening newscasts for ABC, CBS, and NBC; National Public Radio, CNN, and the BBC, among others. He is a regular commentator on Washington, DC's public radio station, WAMU. Mr. Schiraldi has a Masters Degree in Social Work from New York University.
The partners in the initiative are the Youth Law Center, American Bar Association Juvenile Justice Center, Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, Juvenile Law Center, Minorities in Law Enforcement, National Council on Crime and Delinquency and Pretrial Services Resource Center.
The initiative is supported by the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Annie E. Casey, Ford, Mott, MacArthur, Rockefeller and William T. Grant foundations, and the Center on Crime, Communities & Culture of the Open Society Institute. This project was supported by award No. 98-JN-FX-K003 awarded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view or opinions in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice or the supporting foundations.