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It's 10 o'clock and news viewers across the country know where they'll be for the next few minutes: at the scene of the crime.
Crime and violence - what the Denver-based Rocky Mountain Media Watch calls "mayhem" - are as ubiquitous on local news shows as the winsome male-female anchor team and the happy chat between bite-sized bits of coverage. Critics argue that this mayhem not only crowds out more legitimate news but skews reality, that local TV newscasts must share responsibility for the fact that, at a time when crime rates across the country are going down, public anxiety about crime continues to rise.
What if a TV news operation refused to cover crime in the same old way? Would crime still make the same noise in the community? Would the station?
Since the beginning of the year, Austin's ABC affiliate, KVUE-TV, a Gannett station, has been trying to find out. KVUE's experiment not only has given Austin viewers something of a choice, but it has forced the station's staff to reassess long-held assumptions about how to cover crime, or even whether to cover it. It has forced reporters, editors, and news directors to ask that more basic question: What is news?
Partly because violent crime is relatively rare in the city, Austin TV has never been terribly crime-obsessed. But after a complicated network-affiliation swap last year, the local CBS station, re-named K-EYE, hit the market with a bagful of gimmicks, razzle-dazzle graphics, and hyperbole, focusing attention on the way crime gets covered. K-EYE's yen for mayhem may be only slightly more knee-jerk than its competitors', but its approach underscored the public's impression that local TV news thrives on violence and disaster. Although K-EYE's ratings remain in single digits nearly a year after the affiliation shuffle, the station has stayed with its format.
It was KVUE, meanwhile, the longtime ratings pacesetter, that decided to try to break its Pavlovian response to the squawking police scanner and the melodramatic visuals.
Now, before a crime story makes it on the air on KVUE, it must meet one or more of five criteria:
1) Does action need to be taken?
2) Is there an immediate threat to safety?
3) Is there a threat to children?
4) Does...