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. It's slow, but it's happening. It's important that we don't just spew out crime and violence. She acknowledges that crime is easier to cover than almost any other type of story, that there is interest in it and that it tends to travel better across the vast L.A. market than, say, a story about one particular school district. It's important that we don't just spew out crime and violence.