166
PART THREE Political Linkage
By
By the
the
Numbers
Numbers
public priorities, such as education and health care.
How much serious
crime is there in
the United States?
“If it bleeds, it leads” seems to be the mantra of
television news. Indeed, we are in danger in this
country of being overwhelmed by news stories
about crime, and the problem seems to be getting
worse. While coverage of public affairs and foreign
affairs fell throughout the 1990s, news coverage of
crime flourished. Local news coverage is even more
slanted towards crime.
Why It Matters: If television news broadcasts are accurately portraying real trends in crime, then they
are doing a public service. If portrayals are inaccurate, then the public is being misled. This is problematic because public and official perceptions
about the scale of particular social problems affect
politics and government deeply. For instance:
• When pressed by the public to address a perceived problem, government officials respond by
redirecting resources at the problem, and make
budget and personnel decisions in light of it. If
the problem is a false one, then government attention and resources get used ineffectively.
• Candidates campaign on issues that are most
salient to the public. When the public misperceives the scale of a problem, it makes electoral choices based on irrelevant grounds.
• The more threatening the public finds a particular problem, the more it pushes aside other
The Story Behind the Crime
Numbers: How accurately are the
news media portraying the true
state of affairs? To put it
bluntly, not very well. Crime in
general, and violent crime in
particular, declined substantially during the 1990s, at precisely the same time
that concerns about crime were at the forefront of
media, popular attention, and political saliency.
How do we know this to be the case?
The two most widely used measures of the incidence of crime in the United States are the Uniform
Crime Report (UCR) of the FBI and the National
Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) of the
Department of Justice. Each counts the incidence of
crime in a different way. The UCR is based on reports
from law enforcement agencies and is meant to help
state and local police departments track their own
performance and to plan their budgets. The NCVS is
based on a survey of victims of crime and is used to
assess how crime is experienced by Americans and
how it affects them and their families.
Calculating the Crime Rate: The FBI’s UCR, based on
reports submitted voluntarily by state and local law
enforcement agencies, counts the annual incidence
of “violent crimes” (murder, forcible rape, robbery,
and aggravated assault), “property crimes” (burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson),
and “serious crimes” (all of the above). However,
here is what is most important about the FBI’s
methodology: it only counts crimes that come to the
attention of police.
The Justice Department’s NCVS is based on an
annual survey of roughly 50,000 randomly selected
environment and such social issues as civil rights and liberties, abortion, and
women’s rights.23 This is especially true of those employed by certain elite media organizations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and
PBS. It is likely that reporters’ liberalism has been reflected in the treatment
of issues such as nuclear energy, global warming, and toxic waste. In 1990, for
example, an exhaustive three-volume government report that found that damage from acid rain had been greatly overestimated was ignored by virtually all
the major media, except 60 Minutes and The Wall Street Journal.24
But there is little or no systematic evidence that reporters’ personal values regularly affect what appears in the media. Journalists’ commitment to
the idea of objectivity helps them resist temptation, as do critical scrutiny and
CHAPTER 6 The News Media
Criticisms of Crime Rate Calculations: The experts
generally prefer the NCVS numbers to those of the
UCR for understanding the dimensions of the crime
problem. The principal problems with the UCR concern the accuracy of recording and reporting crime.
For example:
• Many serious crimes, especially rape, go unreported to police.
• Ideas about what constitutes a serious crime
may change as social mores change. Domestic
violence was treated in the past by police as a
family matter; now it tends to get recorded
and reported by police.
• A small number of law enforcement agencies
do not participate in the UCR reporting system or do not treat it with the seriousness that
the FBI hopes for.
What to Watch For: Each way of measuring crime is
valid and has its purposes. Though the UCR measure has some problems, it does a fairly good job of
telling us what is going on year to year with respect to police encounters with crime. This, in
turn, is useful to national, state, and local governments in deciding on budget and staffing issues
for law enforcement. The NCVS does a very good
job of telling us what is going on year to year with
2,300
Number of crimes (thousands)
U. S. households. One person over the age of 18 in
each household is interviewed about any crimes
that may have been committed against any member of the household during the previous year. The
result is annual crime victimization information for
more than 100,000 people, a very large number for
a national survey. Because the NCVS includes
crimes experienced by people that are never reported to the authorities, it tends to show higher
rates of serious crime than the UCR.
167
2,100
1,900
NCVS
1,700
1,500
1,300
UCR
1,100
900
700
0
1973 1976
1980
1984
1988
1992
1996 2000
Year
Serious Violent Crimes
Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, United States Department of
Justice, 2001.
respect to overall victimization trends, and gives
us a handle on the size of the underlying crime
problem. The lesson here is to use the statistic
that conforms most closely to the purposes of your
inquiry.
What Do You Think? Do you believe that television
news programs underplay or overplay the incidence
of violent crime? Monitor local and national news
for the next week or so and try to keep a running
count of stories about crime. How does your count
match what the UCR and NCVS numbers are
telling us about crime?
rewriting by editors. And in any case, the liberalism of journalists may be offset by their need to rely on official sources, by their reliance on experts who
are either former officials or associated with centrist or conservative think
tanks, and by conservatism among media owners and publishers. It is also difficult to sustain the position that reporters slant their stories in a liberal direction after witnessing the pummeling Bill Clinton received in the media
throughout his presidency.
Conservative Owners The owners and top managers of most media corporations tend to be very conservative. The shareholders and executives of multibillion-dollar corporations are not very interested in undermining capitalism or,