Kelly McBride: What Crime Reporting Gets Wrong
Kelly McBride, a journalist and Senior VP at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, joins Michael to talk about her long experience on the crime beat and the problems with crime reporting -- how framing sets the narrative and misses the big picture, the peer pressure and race-to-the-bottom nature in some newsrooms, and the long fight for journalistic ethics in the modern world.
Episode Transcript
Michael Pope
I'm Michael Pope, and this is Pod Virginia. A podcast that's jumping on the bandwagon and finally doing a true crime podcast. But wait, it's not what you think. We're actually going to talk about the truth and crime, perhaps more importantly, how the media covers it, exaggerates it, or perhaps doesn't cover it at all. And we've got an incredible guest here today who will challenge your thoughts on this issue. She is the Senior Vice President and Chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. Kelly McBride. Thanks for joining us.
Kelly McBride
You're welcome. Thanks for having me.
Michael Pope
All right. So, I heard you speak about crime reporting at a journalism conference a couple years ago. I have to admit what you said really blew my mind. I'm still thinking about it now, years later. And I think our listeners might also benefit from this. Let's start by talking a little bit about your own time and your professional background as a star crime reporter. You spent eight years as a print journalist covering crime in Ohio, Idaho, and Washington. And even when you moved on to a different beat, a religion beat, they still had you covering crime because you were so good at it. Can you talk a little bit about your own personal experience with this issue?
Kelly McBride
Oh, yeah. I started where many journalists start, which is on the police beat. At night, police are no less, which is where you put young journalists, especially in the 1990s. The way I thought about that job was I was there to get the darkest, seediest, most interesting, and fascinating stories so that I could show people a world they couldn't see on their own. So, I made lots of sources on the police beat; lots of cops, lots of clerks, and lots of crime scene technicians. And I was always looking for the Truman Capote-ish, right? Like the window into the world that nobody could get, and people just couldn't look away from it. Now, some people would describe that as sensationalism, and I wouldn't argue with them. But I would say that being sensational was not my motive. My motive was to create juicy, interesting stories that would really grab the reader. And my additional motives were to show the whole of the community, especially if the community didn't necessarily understand itself very well. I had role models, like there was a reporter named Susie Forest, and she worked in Long Island, I think. There was another reporter named Edna Buchanan, who was famous; she worked in Miami. And these reporters were doing the exact same thing. They were well-sourced and could get inside the darker elements of our community through the police. So yeah, that's what I wanted to do. That's what I did. And that's what my peers rewarded me for. My editors loved it when I brought back those juicy stories. And people who knew me back then, who were older than me, more senior journalists described me as somebody who had a lot of hustle. And I was always coming back to the newsroom with a new story.
Michael Pope
But now, in reflection, looking back on that time in your life, you feel, in a way, you were used by the police. I remember one specific anecdote. You talked about what journalists called the perp walk. When the person is going to get out of the police car and walk into the courthouse, and you get the tip-off, it's gonna happen at a certain time. And so you felt that was a bit of journalistic hustle at the time. But now you think differently about that, right?
Kelly McBride
Completely; that's a great example. Yeah, I was very well sourced among many different law enforcement agencies, like the city agencies, county sheriffs, small towns, State Police, and federal investigators. They would tip me off to different things like We filed this affidavit, or This suspect is going to be taken out of the car and walked into the courtroom around this time. And it never occurred to me to ask why they would want the newspaper or the television stations to have those images or that information. The reason it didn't occur to me was that I wasn't really thinking about how my work should serve somebody. Right? My work should have been serving the readers, the audience. The purpose should have been so they could understand the public safety environment, so they could understand what their own risks were, and whether their public servants were actually doing their jobs. And because I didn't think about that, I didn't think about the fact that in the absence of being very clear about my mission in telling these stories, which is what journalism is supposed to do, in that absence, somebody else's agenda could take up space. And that was the agenda of law enforcement, right. They wanted the public to see them doing their jobs. They wanted the public to believe there was a threat and law enforcement was keeping them safe from that threat. And I was complicit without even knowing that I was complicit in helping them advance their own agenda.
Michael Pope
So you arrived on the scene in the 80s and 90s. But I want to provide a little background to what happened before that time because of the evolution of something called Eyewitness News. And then kind of a spin-off from that, Action News. And that really influenced how journalists thought about crime. Walk us through the evolution and creation of Eyewitness News. And then the creation of Action News.
Kelly McBride
Yeah, so these are television formats that were pioneered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Eyewitness News was created in the late 60s. Before then, local television news really wasn't much of a thing. But they figured out this formula. And the people who invented it are pretty transparent about what it was; they would tell stories of inner-city crime to a suburban audience. And suppose you think about what's happening all throughout the 60s. In that case, white people were fleeing the cities for the suburbs because of integration. Because there was this message that Black people were responsible for crime. So even though nobody ever said that out loud on television, day after day, the stories reinforced that. So, they would cover crime in the inner cities. And this was a crime that was often directly related to poverty. And they would tell those stories to a suburban audience. And it created a journalism and media ecosystem. And so it changed the entire ecosystem. Once one television station started doing it and making money, because the audience grew, other television stations started doing it. And the newspapers also felt that it was very necessary to get into that game. So, in every newspaper newsroom that I worked in, at five o'clock, a bunch of televisions would go on, and we would often watch all three or four television broadcasts at the same time. And whenever they had a crime story that we didn't have, everybody in the newsroom would turn to the police reporter and ask why we didn't have that story. So it really did become this cycle that reinforced itself, and there just became more and more crime stories in the diet of the average news consumer.
Michael Pope
That resonates with me because one of my first jobs, right after I got hired at the first newspaper that I worked for, was to watch the local television news broadcasts. I would watch the five o'clock and write a summary of what all the networks and local networks were doing. I would do this for the editors so they knew if they missed a story or, if you know, the TV had something that wasn't going to be in the newspaper. So you mentioned the history of Eyewitness News as originating in Philadelphia. So the Philadelphia Inquirer has actually done a lot of really good work and reporting on this, including a documentary I encourage our listeners to look at. It's called Lights Camera Crime: How a Philly brand of TV news harmed Black America. So, they unpacked the origin of the Eyewitness News format and explained how it damaged people. One of the people they interviewed for the documentary was the director of Inclusion and Audience Growth at the American Press Institute, Letrell Crittenden, and he said this.
Letrell Crittenden
This format is specifically geared toward telling the pain and tragedy of these communities without any real attempt to provide a greater context for the everyday lived experience in these communities.
Michael Pope
What's your reaction to that? To what Letrell Crittenden is saying here? How is it damaging to describe the pain and tragedy of a community without even considering the context?
Kelly McBride
Well, I mean, he's dead on; in that, one of the first lessons I learned when I came to the Poynter Institute, so I spent 15 years as a newspaper reporter. Then, I came to the Poynter Institute to specialize in journalism ethics. And journalism ethics is a really interesting world. Because as an unlicensed profession, we get to make up our own ethics, and every newsroom has its own ethical standards. There is a lot of peer pressure and journalism, and they tend to conform with each other. Sometimes, it can be a race to the bottom. And I think when you look at this cheap crime reporting, that's exactly what you see, a race to the bottom. So, when I came to Poynter, I realized there are many topics where we make choices about what stories we tell based on a set of values. And the first one that I realized was the story we tell about rape and sexual assault. So the only stories that we used to cover about rape and sexual assault were when somebody got kidnapped and was likely raped. The problem with that story of a stranger kidnapping is that it's the rarest of rare among all of the rapes and sexual assaults that happen. It is much more likely that somebody who is raped is raped by somebody they know. It's even more likely that if you are sexually assaulted, you'll be sexually assaulted by somebody within your own family or household. When I realized the discrepancy, I realized that we tell the truth in this very narrow, specific way, and this incident happened; however, in choosing to only tell that one type of truth, we actually misinformed the public about the big picture. And that is a failure. And it's a failure that harms the public because of the misinformation they make. They don't have the information they need to make better choices and prevent the tragedy that we're actually talking about. The same is true with crime. We tell very specific stories about very specific communities. But we don't tell the big picture. We don't tell whether the trend is going up or down. We don't tell the story for the entire community; we focus on the communities that are closest to the newsroom, most of which happen to be downtown. So that distorts it, and then we tell the stories that the police point us to. When the internet came along, we actually had so much more capacity to tell news stories, and stories about crime increased by about 700% at the time. And at that, crime was actually decreasing. So, there is this disconnect between the larger narrative and the way the story is told through the daily news and media. It's problematic because it actually harms very specific communities, and they're the same communities that have historically been harmed by a number of systemic inequities. And so George Floyd happens, and we start having this conversation about how the police always say that a person died in custody. Still, they don't tell you the whole story. And suddenly, a light bulb went up in my head, and I was like, oh, my God. It's not just when somebody is killed in police custody; it's actually the whole narrative of crime and how we tell the story. And suddenly, it was just so obvious that the media and journalism, local journalism in particular, are part of the problem. And suppose we don't get on top of it in the same way that you see newspapers apologizing for their role in spurring lynch mobs and perpetuating slavery, running classifieds for slaves. In that case, you see them apologizing for that now; in 50 years, we will be apologizing for this, especially if we keep doing it.
Michael Pope
Yeah, I want to unpack that discrepancy a little bit between the reality and the perception. You talked about how, on the early internet, there was so much more crime reporting; I think you said there was a 700% increase at a time when crime was going down. This is something that I've talked about on this podcast many times, especially last year, which was an election year here in Virginia. We had a ton of TV commercials about how crime is on the rise, so be afraid and vote Republican. And yet, if you look at the FBI statistics, crime is down in every category. So there was this discrepancy between reality and people's perceptions, which was part of this great documentary that the Philadelphia Inquirer put together. And one of the people who touched on this is the research director at the Annenberg Public Policy Senator Dan Romer; this is part of what he's had to say about that.
Dan Romer
So, crime was actually going down. But what was happening on local TV news was that you wouldn't know that because anywhere from 18% to 24% of local news on any given night was dedicated to crime in the city. And when you then look at what's being covered in these crime stories, you see persons of color much more frequently featured in those stories than they were and the rest of the news, like twice as much.
Michael Pope
Twice as much. And that has an impact on your State House and the kind of legislation that the General Assembly considers. Here's more of what Dan Romer had to say about that
Dan Romer
The coverage we think of crime on local TV news was a factor in creating fear among people, leading to other kinds of political problems like the need for harsher sentencing, more police, and the war on drugs.
Michael Pope
So, Kelly McBride, this is not just an academic discussion of journalists navel-gazing about how they cover the crime. This has a real impact, with mandatory minimum sentences and all these tough-on-crime measures that lawmakers here in Virginia and across the country are considering, right?
Kelly McBride
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in the 90s, we started talking about super predators, and a lot has been done and said about super predators and how that was essentially a moral panic. If you want to see the whole story, The New York Times did a really great seven-minute documentary on that term, super predators. You can look it up; it's pretty easy to find. But I was part of that; I used to know that word. And in Spokane, Washington, I quoted the police chief, telling the public that the Bloods and the Crips were coming to town to sell our kids crack cocaine. And I was one of the reporters in every community around the country that was buying into that narrative. As a result, 48 out of 50 states in the 90s toughened up their sentencing of juveniles, they made it easier to prosecute a juvenile as an adult, they made minimum mandatory sentences universal, they took some of the rehabilitative punishments or effects out of the juvenile criminal justice system and replaced them with punitive ones. All of that was actually so that when social scientists studied whether those policies were effective, they generally concluded that those policies were harmful to children. And we were part of that; why did they do that? Because we were all writing about these super predators, you know, who were going to, you know, this generation of crack babies that didn't have a conscience or a soul. And how they're going to kill us all. We fed that fear. And in Spokane, Washington, now that I look back on it, it was so silly. It was so silly because the Bloods and the Crips were not going to be a real threat in Spokane, Washington. It was just too small of a community. You know, meth became a much bigger problem in Spokane than crack cocaine ever became. And yet, the police chief was very willing to point to the Bloods and the Crips. And rather than me doing my job and challenging, whether there was any evidence for him to say that, I just repeated it. And that was a failure on my part.
Michael Pope
Alright, so I want to turn to solutions, or at least suggestions or even thoughts about how things might be different. And I want to start by asking a question that you asked at this journalism conference I was at, which is, what makes crime news? And I have to admit that I pondered over that day. And I'm still thinking about that. I mean, like, I'm thinking about all the murders that I covered here in Alexandria, Virginia, and I'm thinking what made any of those murders actually newsworthy like all murders are not newsworthy, only some of them that are. How do you make that decision about what crime is newsworthy? And what crime is not?
Kelly McBride
Well, I mean, there isn't a generic answer to that. But since then, since I gave that talk, I have started this program at Poynter, where I take groups of newsrooms through a several-week course; we meet online, and a team from the newsroom comes, and I ask them to redefine the answer to this very question. To start with, what is the promise that you are making to your audience as a news organization regarding public safety? And the first answer to that is, well, it's unspoken and vague. So I asked them to speak it out loud, write it down, and make it specific, and I drove them toward a promise of information about public safety. Once I get the newsrooms to that definition, then I ask them to analyze the work that they're doing and figure out how much of it actually fits into that public safety-driven mission of informing the public. Once you start asking that question, you can really start to get some answers about what your community needs. Now, the really shallow way of answering that question is, well, people just need to know where the shootings are so they can avoid those areas. But when you get down to a deep analysis of what makes somebody likely to become a victim of crime, if you could avoid the area, you would, right? The people who are victims of crime are victims because they can't avoid the area or because the crime is coming from within their own family. So, to really deepen the understanding of what makes someone vulnerable to crime and to stop perpetuating this narrative that it's all random, And that if you can avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time, you will be safe. Instead, you should inform people about their real risk. That's going to be unique to every single market and every single community.
Michael Pope
So those that would be a message to journalists, most of our listeners are not journalists. They're news consumers. So, I want to talk about what people shouldn't be having in their minds when they consume news. I want to point to a newspaper that I routinely read, The New York Post; maybe it's a personality flaw of mine, but I love the New York Post. So I just want to read a part of this story and sort of look at it in the context of what we've been talking about. So this is the lead, a Bronx gangster who racked up 10 arrests this year on a bevy of wild charges is free on the streets after being repeatedly sprung without bail. It goes on to call him a brazen gangster who has a laundry list of alleged offenses, and they go through them. When people see this story in The New York Post, turn on their local TV news, or even listen to True Crime podcasts, what should people have in the back of their minds as they're consuming this news?
Kelly McBride
That is a really great question. So, as a news consumer, you can ask a lot of questions about the information you're getting. So, one is just about the language, right? What type of language is being used? And how does that language create an emotional response in me? That lead that you just read. They are talking about a gangster, right? So that's a pejorative term; without saying what qualifies him as being a gangster, they are describing a system in which bad people are turned out on the streets without specifically bringing any sort of analysis to that system. And the system that they're talking about is the system of bail. And there is an effort to reform the bail system because of the way that it is unequally applied, I'm assuming this is a person of color. But they don't necessarily say that; tell me I'm wrong, though.
Michael Pope
His name is Emmanuel Santiago, and he is allegedly a member of the Latin Kings gang. So, you're right; this is actually aimed at influencing people's perceptions of bail. The whole lead was like, this is about bail reform.
Kelly McBride
Right, and this has been a theme of the New York Post, to turn the public against bail reform. Namely, because it's really incendiary. And it taps into fear, and it makes them money. Like, let's just be blatant about it, saying that it makes them money. When you actually look at some of the studies about bail reform, what you find is that the story in the New York Post and many other news organizations, the story they're telling about bail reform is completely different from what the science says about bail reform and the way that it's applied. But they're not interested in the big-picture truth. They're interested in these very narrow stories that are cherry-picked in a way that they can, say, add up to a truth that really is a distortion of the truth. So, as a consumer, you can look at the language. The other thing that you can ask is, why are they telling me this? What do they want me to do with this information? And then I think the last thing that you can ask is, where can I get information that will actually help me be safer as a citizen? So, whether you live in New York or have traveled to New York, what do you really need to know about crime in New York to help keep yourself safe? If there are actionable things that you can do, you want to know what those are. Still, they probably don't give you them, and you don't have any information about what you can do to keep yourself safe in that story. And that's because they don't; that's not the purpose of that story. So, as a consumer of news, you can start asking, well, where could I get that type of information? And you can seek it out.
Michael Pope
To be fair to the New York Post and other journalism outlets, a lot of times, when you're consuming news, adding a newspaper article, or watching something on television, you're not at all interested in actionable things that you can do. You just want a good story. I mean, you actually opened up your personal history in journalism, talking about how you love telling these seedy stories. And yeah, sure, some people might describe that as sensationalism. But I mean, there is part of this, this adoptive part of this, that is the need to be entertained, right?
Kelly McBride
So there's nothing wrong with being entertaining. However, the problem comes in when entertainment becomes a distortion of the truth. And when it becomes an agenda. That's really for somebody else, right? The police have a particular agenda in New York and in many other cities in fighting bail reform. They would prefer to keep doing things the way they've been doing it for years. Journalists have this alliance with cops for a number of reasons. One is just because we see them out on the streets, and we get a lot of information from them. But the other thing is we tend to make salaries similar to theirs. So, we live similar lives to police officers. And so the question for the news consumer is, is it really just entertaining? Or is it actually a piece of disinformation? And suppose it's entertaining but undermines the core value of telling the truth. In that case, that's when a neutral value becomes a negative value.
Michael Pope
I told our listeners this was going to be thought-provoking, and you're certainly living up to that. I want to do work toward the end of this podcast by asking you about your efforts here. You mentioned this course you have for journalists. Have you seen change out there in the field in terms of journalists changing their practices and the secondary effects of statehouses reconsidering some of that tough-on-crime stuff they did in the 90s?
Kelly McBride
So yes, to the first, and no to the second. I think it's too early, and I gotta tell you, this is an uphill battle; we are rolling this rock up a really steep hill. And I honestly think it's going to take 10 years of this effort before we see critical mass in the journalism industry. I mentioned earlier that journalism doesn't have a universal set of ethics. It lives in every single newsroom because we're an unlicensed profession. Journalists are influenced by their peers. And I need to convince enough newsrooms and enough individual journalists that this change is ultimately in the interests of our democratic missions in society. Making the change is really hard because these weird decisions that we make about covering crime have become infused in the DNA of our newsrooms; crime decisions are really diffuse, right like the lowest employee gets to decide whether to cover a crime or not, the lowest level employee. They are so endemic to what we think of as local news, and particularly breaking news, that we don't even question whether those are healthy choices. It's sort of like breathing dirty air; you don't really know you're breathing it until it becomes so bad that it has a negative health effect. So, I have 22 newsrooms going through the program right now. And before this, I've taken just about 80 newsrooms through the program. And so by the end of this year, I'll be right at 100. And I would say that of the newsrooms that go through the program, about 70% of them make significant changes, and they're not all television newsrooms. But including some television newsrooms that are really changing the way they have relationships with their audiences. The ABC station in Phoenix, Arizona, has very much decided that it's the watchdog station, and it's going to do watchdog reporting on law enforcement. The station, the KING-5 in Seattle, has very much defined its relationship with its audience as we are the place that displays the most voices. So they have a policy that says that when there's a crime story, they don't just want the police voices; they want to make sure they include the voices of the people who are most impacted by the crime, either directly or as members of the community. And that is a huge effort. But it's been two years for them now. It's really paying off because the community now sees them as the place where if you are just a regular person. You want your voice heard; well, that's the station that you're going to go to. And so they're the stations that have been through the program and are seeing that their relationships with their communities get redefined. It's definitely a Herculean task.
Michael Pope
She is the Senior Vice President and Chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, Kelly McBride. Thanks for joining us.
Kelly McBride
Well, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure you can have you have great questions.
