Journalists urged to rethink their crime reporting practices
Experts suggest a mission-driven approach to report police stories
When Kelly McBride was a police reporter, her routine involved the typicals — rewriting press releases, looking through crime logs, covering court cases and building connections with public information officers — without questioning the underlying reasons for these practices.
It wasn’t until she joined Poynter after 15 years in the industry to work on its ethics curriculum that she came to a realization — she and the broader industry had fallen short in fulfilling their journalistic mission to accurately inform the public.
Instead, their crime reporting contributed to a misguided public perception of crimes.
Key issues: Journalists are relying on the police as a sole source; they’re maintaining friendly relationships with cops; they’re acting as a PR machine for police departments in some instances.
At a panel at Brown Institute for Media Innovation last month, crime reporting experts called on newsrooms and journalists to reexamine how crime stories are portrayed in the media.
“If we're going to hold the police accountable, we need to be looking over their shoulder,” said McBride, Poynter’s senior vice president and chair of Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership.
Despite recent data indicating an 11.8% decrease in homicides nationwide, a Gallup poll found 56% of Americans believe crime has risen in their neighborhoods, marking the highest since 1989.
McBride, who teaches the “Transforming Crime Reporting Into Public Safety Journalism” course at Poynter, attributed this discrepancy to local news outlets focusing on individual incidents rather than addressing broader trends.
That was also the case in Philadelphia, where the Eyewitness News format was founded in the 1960s. Nine years after the city reported a record-high homicide rate in 1990, it dropped by 42%. However, the coverage on local news didn't reflect that reality.
Al Primo, the founder of the news format that was attributed for creating racial bias against Black people, said in a documentary by The Inquirer: “The minute we put the Eyewitness News format into place, the ratings started increasing” and that translated into more revenue.
McBride said other news organizations copied the format, and it became a daily beat — ultimately building a newsroom culture that often leads to incomplete or biased reporting.
“(Journalists) tend to become beholden to the police so they develop, rather than an accountability relationship, friendly relationship,” she said. “Because if the cops tell them about this big arrest … then the journalist goes back to the newsroom with the story and is rewarded for that.”
Matt Stroud, a reporter at Better Government Association, echoed concerns about reporters unintentionally promoting law enforcement agendas, as seen in his experience writing about police department spending on new weapon technology.
“I was a part of that, I was like trying to market that,” Stroud said. “Why am I the PR person?”
Stroud documented this pattern in his book “Thin Blue Lie,” which includes how the press played a part in the rise of the use of Tasers by reporting how “cool” they were.
“This plugging and nagging, we were essentially advertising for this weapon,” he said.
Chenjerai Kumanyika, an assistant professor of journalism at New York University, said journalists need to question police authority and not assume that everything they say is true.
Recalling her time as a crime reporter when McBride encountered conflicting information between a police report and witness interviews, her editor instructed her to prioritize the police narrative.
“There are the things about civil legal protection that force you to go with words of the cops,” McBride said. “If you make a habit of looking at police reports, you will realize that cops get things wrong, a lot of things wrong.”
And there’s no space to talk about it in the newsrooms.
McBride said as a 21-year-old reporter, she never questioned whether a crime beat was really the mission of journalism in a democracy. But if she did, she said she would “have laughed out of that place.”
Kumanyika drew parallels to challenges faced by academics amid global conflicts. Like academia, Kumanyika said journalists should be able to talk about dilemmas facing them freely.
But even if they wanted to change, they still had deadlines to adhere to and stories to get out.
Todd Whitney, an impact fellow at Brown Institute, said he understood from an early age the messages behind crime coverage, growing up as a Black person. He carried that understanding to his radio reporting job.
Despite his awareness, when Whitney reported on crimes, he said he always thought “I gotta hit this deadline, I gotta get this story out.”
“Why is it so tough to get away from this?” said Whitney, who moderated the Brown panel.
McBride, who has trained about 75 newsrooms across the country through her Poytner course, recommended news outlets come up with mission statements and critically analyze whether their stories align with these statements.
She said it usually ended up being a very small number. Then, she encouraged them to come up with a plan to combat their own culture.
“Can you create a policy that says you will never report that story that is dependent on one source?” McBride said, referring to how news uses the phrase “police said.”
When a story doesn’t include voices from people who are most affected by the crime, a broader context or representation of the defense attorney, “can we say we’re not going to do that story?” McBride asked.
The overarching message from the panel was clear — it's time for journalists and newsrooms to rethink their approach to crime reporting and strive for more balanced, accountable and informative coverage.
