No more baby steps in fixing crime coverage

We know the beats before we hear them. The crime stories that permeate our phones, laptops, TVs, and radios repeat the same narratives so many time. Every day of our lives, we can expect to see images of police tape outstretched, red and blue lights flashing, sirens blaring, officers inspecting a crime scene. We can expect to hear about harm and violence, to know someone as a killer before we even know their names or their histories. Perhaps we’ll see the tear-streaked faces of parents, spouses, children, and neighbors as untold grief unfolds. This all happens so quickly.

The criticism of this kind of coverage also feels like it’s been repeating on a loop. We know there’s not enough context or care, that too few solutions are reported, that there’s too much fear-mongering that harms certain communities — especially Black and Brown ones.

Following the election, journalists, researchers, and organizers looking to change how journalism is practiced are both motivated and drained, longing to connect and deeply fractured. We’re not on the same page about whether to focus more on incremental wins or invest in transformative strategies. It’s become routine for me to hold space for people who don’t agree, debate this with colleagues, then become even more tired as the country’s political turmoil exhausts them further.

Something that fascinates me about our world is that we frequently frame incrementalism and transformation as inherently opposed — when a lot of newsrooms and organizations seek both. The same newsrooms that resist overhauling their editorial policies often want to engage Black and Brown news consumers they haven’t before. The same advocacy groups that finger-wag newsrooms for failing to change enough often copiously track the small wins for their impact reports. As someone who has worked in both spaces, I’ve seen journalists and organizers alike implement strategies for slow-inching progress and systemic change simultaneously, whether they identify with one approach more than the other — then show up to meetings debating them as an either/or. These also feel like repeating cycles.

In my role as a program manager at Free Press, where I work with journalists and community members to change crime coverage, I study the history of how journalistic practices have and haven’t changed, and it’s taught me a lot of lessons. Here are two of them: Incrementalism happens regardless, and we’re going to keep inheriting unequal editorial norms until we give them up.

We didn’t just wake up with this type of crime coverage. We got here through nearly 600 years of editorial choices, in one story after the other, from the birth of the printing press to today. It’s a colonial lineage where traditions that originated in Europe crossed the Atlantic and evolved to define everyday life on this land solely from the perspective of new white arrivals, not from everyone.

It’s important to remember that the coverage we have today descends from one of the earliest genres of print media, where pamphleteers would explore crimes in grave detail. These were often moral stories, straight-up sermons even, where people could be defined as either good or bad. Deep-seated fears about murder were storytelling fodder. Early European settlers used these stories to share accounts of violence in the colonies, as Indigenous people and enslaved Africans experienced genocide and slavery and resisted both. Even before the United States became the United States, both true and fake accounts of Black and Brown people committing harm or revolting spread in early newspapers. Race in the news could be code for who to fear, for how we see violence, and for who should be punished.

Yes, race relations have evolved, but newsrooms continue to pass that dynamic down. The immorality of racial disparities in how journalists cover violence, safety, life, and death are all industry norms that have ancestors. I continue to see dehumanizing coverage that appeals to fascination with gruesome details, coverage that strums deep-seated fears and delivers news on tragic events in a style that feels like infotainment. A lot has changed, but not enough.

If we want to change what’s stayed the same for so long, I’d argue that incrementalism won’t work. You cannot maintain cultural safety, value Black and Brown lives, establish multicultural ethics, share power equitably, or reject exploitative storytelling through baby steps or sometimey-ness. These conditions are materially present or they aren’t. If we can’t produce these conditions, I predict that we’ll keep repeating ourselves.