Assessing Cultivation Theory and Public Health Model for Crime Reporting

A survey of a Midwestern community supported a public health model of crime reporting and found respondents saying the media pay too much attention to crime. Respondents provided modest support for cultivation theory, with no differences found for effects of newspapers and television. Violence is popular in America. It is ubiquitous. It leads to boffo box office. It is a popular topic in political campaigns. It is a cheap and easy way to sell newspapers or bump up ratings. This paper seeks to address the sociological effects of violence in the media, to discuss how violence is generally covered by news media on a local level, to assess the feelings of residents of a Midwestern university town regarding news coverage and analyze survey results from both cultivation effects and public health reporting perspectives. Violence in the media Violence in the media is a longstanding issue. In early research, George Gerbner noted violence in 66 percent of approximately 3,000 American films produced from 1950 to 1961. He also observed, in the 1950s, that more than 75 percent of television drama contained acts of violence and it predominated in 56 percent of the programs. In 1967 and 1968, he recorded that 80 percent of television programming contained violent portrayals. (1) A three-year study sponsored by the National Cable Television Association found that violence continues to be prevalent. Prime time broadcast programs containing violent content increased by 14 percent between 1994 and 1998 and similar content increased by 10 percent on cable stations during the same time frame(1). The percentage of prime time broadcast and cable programs with violence ranged from 58 percent in year one to 61 percent in years two and three. Researchers found that a minimum of six violent incidents occur in each hour of the typical violent program. (2) But violent content is not limited to entertainment programming. Crime also is a dominant topic of local news broadcasts. Paul Klite, Robert Bardwell and Jason Salzman found that crime stories consumed "about a third of the total time devoted to news. " They found that violent crimes are most frequently aired and that murder, though infrequent among crime types, is the most commonly covered crime on television newscasts. "On 56 stations, more than half the crime coverage relates to murder," they wrote. (3) John McManus was interested to learn whether, in making news decisions, local television news would be treated as a commodity, following an economic model, or a public service, following a journalistic model. He found that television news, in large part, was simply a regurgitation of newspaper content. This observation provides evidence that newspapers play an influential role in the news agenda-setting process not only of their own organizations, but in that of broadcast news outlets as well. McManus found the economic model dominated the three stations he observed. There was little attention paid to innovation in news gathering. (4) "Crime news is a staple of journalism, and reporting it has been considered a public duty of the press. " Nevertheless, Walter Jaehnig and his colleagues found the newspapers emphasize "relatively infrequent violent crimes. "(5) A 1994 study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs showed that news stories regarding crimes more than tripled between 1990 and 1994. Gerbner reported that "local TV news crime reports [doubled] in the past two years [1995-96]. (6)" Phyllis Kaniss notes that today's journalists identify strongly with local power structures-city and county officers, police and fire departments, housing authorities and so forth. The news that emerges from these sources is often bad news - news of crime, indigence, health problems and so forth. (7) One study showed that newspapers in St. Louis greatly distorted the reality of criminal activity. E.T. Jones found that "the typical murder had slightly more than 90 times as much attention as the average major crime. …