It isn't the bloody lead I'm worried about. It's what comes after it. Stations are stacking one crime story on top of another. And they're not even crimes in that particular market. I've seen stations reach out to cities 800 miles away to cover a four-car crash.
Crime news is also fast, cheap and easy to produce.
With pressure on TV stations to keep costs down and profits up, and with more and more news hours to fill, it's easy to turn on the police scanner and then send a crew to a crime scene to shoot some pictures of grieving relatives. Suburban whites begin to think of the inner city as ridden with crime and violence and drugs. So they vote for more jails, harsher and longer sentences and capital punishment. People are afraid to go out at night, they're distrustful. But there is hope.