Local News Media Critique

Local TV Crime

     By Gabi Bleuel

Most local TV news stations focus the majority of their time for news on crime stories, and they showed lots of stories that were not actual news stories. A month long review of four local news stations (Wave 3, WHAS, WLKY, WDRB) showed that over 40% of all news stories played during this time were crime stories. Local news violates many principles used by good journalists.

The four local news stations surveyed showed that crime stories are very popular among local news stations. Crime stories are not newsworthy unless the people in that area could be affected by the doer of the crimes. Un-newsworthy stories are not showed for the good of the people, but for the interests of them. The David Camm Trial, for example, is a crime story. The outcome of his trial does not affect anyone but the family of David Camm. This may be interesting to some people, but it’s not newsworthy.

Crime stories also violate the Enterprise yardstick of journalism. Enterprise means that journalists should practice active reporting (investigating and seeking answers to relevant matters in the community) instead of passive reporting (waiting for an event to happen and reporting on the information that is given). Most of the crime stories aired on local TV news stations are found because the station listens to an emergency scanner radio and when a crime is reported, they rush to the scene to get video and interviews of the crime. This requires no investigating and hardly any work to do.  

The amount of crime stories aired on local news stations is overwhelming. Over 40% of the stories aired during the survey were crime stories! The next most played category is social issues and human interests, and it only accounted for 18.47% of the stories aired. The pie chart below shows the ratio of crime compared to other types of stories that were played in the month of the survey

Another problem with local news is that they do not make the important interesting. Instead they make the interesting sound important. In other words, they do not tell their viewers what they need to know. They show viewers what they might want to know. They have a lack of ‘real news’. Real news is not necessarily made to entertain people, it is made to tell people things that are currently happening, effect a large amount of people, and is relevant to a specific area. The pie chart above shows that the and fluff categorie take up another large portion of local TV news. Most of the stories in that category are not real news. On Wave 3 a story was played on October 28th during the 6-6:30 news about how the Louisville Orchestra has a new music director. This only affects the people in the Louisville Orchestra, and they most likely already know. This story is a fluff/other story. It does not tell the viewer anything they need to know or anything that could affect them.

Local TV news also violates one of the Seven Yardsticks of Journalism called explanation. Explanation means that news stations should have a reason that tells why their story matters. Wave 3 news often talks about a story for a long time without giving any reasons why the story matters to people or the community. Filling a story with facts and interviews can make it seem important, but there's often no real reason to air it.

Compared to the Courier Journal, local TV news stations could definitely improve. There was only 13% of crime stories compared to local TV new, which had over 40%.  The Courier Journal also has more range of stories. No one category stands out as much as the local TV news categories. Because of the larger range in stories there are also a lot more newsworthy stories. The pie chart below shows the relationship between different categories of stories in the Courier Journal during the month long review.

Crime  for the Courier Journal is not domination their stories. Its actually not even close to the main topic among their stories. Business/economy is the main category. Those type of stories are much more newsworthy than solved crime stories. The Courier Journal also is much more proportional. The newsworthy categories are larger than the others.

Local TV news definitely has a lot of problems to fix before they can be good journalism. They need to fix their problems with newsworthiness, explanation, enterprise, and making the important interesting instead of making the interesting sound important. They need to reduce the amount crime and fluff stories. Maybe one day local Tv news can be real news ‘instead of local TV crime’