Crime news

Crime news is a highly developed sub-genre that reflects organizational priorities, audience preferences and systemic biases. This is because “the news media does not cover systematically all forms and expressions of crime and victimizations. It emphasizes some crimes and ignores other crimes. It sympathizes with some victims while blaming other victims.”[1]

This results in a paradox: while many countries have witnessed “notable reduction of many traditional forms of crime over recent decades,” the volume of news and information about violent crime “has never been so extensive.”[2] This gap between reported reality and social reality is driven by industry practices and genre tropes that shape public perception and policy.

The origins of the crime beat: economics and sensationalism

The dominance of crime news as a sub-genre is rooted in specific economic incentives and the application of news industry norms and values that favor sensationalism over context. 

A crucial factor in the rise of crime coverage, particularly in broadcast media, is simple economics. Historically, news organizations have found that crime stories fulfill commercial needs with maximum efficiency. Former Action News anchor Larry Kane explained the dynamic: “Crime was cheap to cover. It was easy to cover.” He elaborated that producers could instruct a cameraman, “You shoot the scene, you shoot the blood, you shoot victims, whatever they got. And you can do it in 20 seconds,” creating content quickly and affordably.[3]

This focus on sensational content is driven by standard ‘newsworthiness’ values, which filter and shape content. The core elements reporters look for include immediacy, dramatization, personalization, titillation and novelty. Novelty, in particular, means that most news tends to be “about deviance in some form.”[4]

The genre’s origins are also linked to specific historical periods where media volume drastically outpaced actual crime trends:

• 1970s and 1980s paranoia: During this era, local news outlets were instrumental in manufacturing the kind of “stranger danger” paranoia that continues to influence public imagination and fundamentally “rewire our understanding of our shared social space.” Highly publicized cases like serial killings and child abductions became “tabloid fodder” despite contributing to less than one percent of murders.[5]
• The coverage paradox of the 1990s: Despite federal statistics demonstrating that crime fell 34 percent from 1991 to 2000, news stories about crime focused on homicide rose by over 700 percent during the same decade.[6] This disconnect illustrates that coverage volume is not determined by crime rates, but is “more responsive to political occurrences, campaigns and agendas.”[7]