A Massive Fail on Crime Reporting by "The New York Times," NPR

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:
Kyle Stucker
@KyleStucker
Despite "overwhelming research," journalism today continues to ignore key crime facts, instead following "familiar and dangerous patterns" that involve problematic, overly narrow and simplistic stories, @ScottHech writes in @thenation.

A Massive Fail on Crime Reporting by “The New York Times,” NPR
Sensational stories about a “spike” in murders offer a model of how not to cover criminal justice.
thenation.com
10:48 AM · Oct 7, 2021

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/crime-reporting-failure/

On September 27, 2021, the FBI released much-anticipated crime data on that most unusual year 2020. The statistics revealed a continued steady decline in major crimes overall—apart from one unfortunate outlier: homicides. Despite homicides being at historic lows, especially when compared to the 1980s and 1990s, the murder rate last year rose by 30 percent compared to the previous year. This rise has left journalists and analysts seeking explanations. Yet the notoriously volatile nature of short-term crime data renders such efforts futile. Ascribing a short-term fluctuation to any particular cause—even a global pandemic—is impossible.

While police and allies have attempted to use the data to tie “bail reform” and racial justice protests to this past year’s rise in murders, those claims are contradicted by the geography of the rise in homicides, which occurred across the country: in red and blue states, in jurisdictions that have seen some measured wins for criminal and civil justice and those that haven’t, in jurisdictions that saw protests against police violence, and those that haven’t—and all despite massive police budgets.

Let’s take a step back. My admittedly dry account above of the newsworthiness of the new FBI data and subsequent efforts to twist it is how the story could and should have been reported by journalists. No sensationalism. No speculation. At least some context and nuance. And what we can actually determine based on the data.

But if you were to read the coverage of the data’s release by news sources like The New York Times and NPR, you would now likely believe that the only news from the FBI data was that there was an unprecedented spike in homicides—and that this unprecedented spike, against all evidence to the contrary and the FBI data itself, could very well have been caused by bail reform and protests for racial justice following the police killing of George Floyd.

*snip*

[live love laugh]

1. It should be called the No-Context Newz. nt

[Scrivener7]

2. The Times is a mess right now.

[DanieRains]

3. You Can't Put Context In A 6 Word Headline

Which is usually 90% of the story.

[underpants]

4. If it bleeds it leads and if it's not bleeding beat it until it does