The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/media/)
Reporting by the South Florida Sun Sentinel and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on mass shootings won awards. Another winner was Hannah Dreier of ProPublica for a series on a crackdown on the MS-13 gang that also won a John Jay College of Criminal Justice prize this year.
Susan Chira, a New York Times reporter and editor for nearly 40 years, will become editor in chief of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on criminal justice.
Efforts by some media to sensationalize mass shooting incidents can be counterproductive, a panel of journalists and educators said in the second part of The Crime Report’s annual review of U.S. criminal justice coverage.
After NBC News disclosed that 10 journalists’ names appeared on a secret federal list of border troublemakers, Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) called on U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan to provide an unclassified briefing on the operation by Thursday.
The clash between Brett Kavanaugh and accuser Christine Blasey Ford topped the 10 stories with the highest number of minutes on last year’s ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts, says analyst Andrew Tyndall. Criminal justice figured in six of those top stories.
Mass shootings, the special counsel’s Russia investigation, immigration, and sexual assault charges against powerful men in the worlds of entertainment, media and business dominated the news media coverage of criminal justice in 2018. But the most significant development, as it was in 2017, was the continued drop in coverage of local justice issues.
After a year of concentration on national politics, much coverage of crime and justice in 2017 in the U.S. news media shifted to a discussion of the presidential election’s aftermath and of a topic given new prominence by Donald Trump’s presidency: immigration.
The verdict is mixed, according to The Crime Report’s annual survey released Friday. Despite some bright spots, continued layoffs and closures have forced many smaller news outlets to reduce their coverage, leaving millions of Americans in the dark about the practices of local courts, law enforcement and justice agencies.
The Columbia Journalism Review says a “growing chorus of voices” is urging the media to rethink the way they approach mass shootings. One media critic says journalists should work to minimize the possibility of copycat shooters.
As the first anniversary of the Parkland, Fl.,school massacre nears, two researchers offer some suggestions for how media coverage of mass shooting can avoid the “copycat” phenomenon.