Should the Coverage Fit the Crime?

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 the crime have significant community impact?

5) Does the story lend itself to a crime-prevention effort?

No sooner were these guidelines installed on January 21 than they were tested by a trio of murder stories. In early February, in the small town of Elgin, thirty miles east of Austin and in the KVUE viewing area, three men shot and killed each other during a Saturday-night brawl. The triple murder failed to make the KVUE newscast.

The station's three competitors aired the story. "When somebody's killed, that's news," says Jeff Godlis, K-EYE's news director. But to Mike George, KVUE's news manager, the incident was unfortunate, but it wasn't news. George points out that a KVUE reporter drove to Elgin twice to investigate. She found that the men, all Mexican nationals, were not permanent Elgin residents, and that the dispute that prompted the shootings was an isolated incident fueled by drugs and alcohol.

"There was no immediate threat to public safety, no threat to children, and there was really no action that you would take, other than to say ‘I don't want to go to that part of Elgin,' " says Cathy McFeaters, KVUE's executive producer. "It really wasn't a crime-prevention story, so then the question becomes significant community impact, and the reaction that we got by just asking people about it was that they weren't too concerned." Staff members worried that some might think the reason this story did not air had to do with the nationality of the killers and victims. "We talked about whether it would make a difference if these guys were from Lubbock or New York or wherever," McFeaters says. "It didn't."

The second story, during the third week of the experiment, involved a man who stabbed his wife in the front yard of their home and then barricaded himself inside the house. Some of KVUE's competitors reported live from the scene.

 KVUE's reporter on the scene found that the man inside the house was eighty-two years old, could barely walk, and was nearly blind. He had no criminal record and seemed to present no threat to neighbors or to the police. Again, the incident didn't meet the guidelines, and KVUE did not air the story.

 The third story took place in a Wal-Mart parking lot, where a twenty-one-year-old man, after an argument inside the store with two teenagers, was shot and killed when he walked outside. Because the perpetrators were at large at the time of the newscast, thus meeting the threat-to-public-safety guideline, and because the shooting happened in a busy Wal-Mart parking lot, the story easily met KVUE's guidelines.

 "Austin police need your help today," KVUE anchor Walt Maciborski began. "They are looking for suspects in a murder at a Wal-Mart store. The shooting happened in the parking lot of the store in Northeast Austin last night. . . . Police arrested a sixteen-year-old at his home this morning and charged him with murder. They are looking at store surveillance tape to find other suspects." A seventeen-year-old was later arrested and charged.

McFeaters, KVUE's thirty-one-year-old executive producer, is the catalyst for the crime-coverage experiment. An associate producer at KVUE during and after her college years at the University of Texas at Austin, she then went to the Gannett station in Jacksonville, Florida, and took a job in 1991 as a producer at ABC's WSOC in Charlotte, North Carolina. That ABC affiliate bears the dubious distinction of being the ninth-worst station for excessive "mayhem" out of a hundred that the Rocky Mountain Media Watch group examined last fall. (The top three stations on the "mayhem index" are WLKY-TV, Louisville, Kentucky; KNBC-TV, Los Angeles; and KFOR-TV, Oklahoma City.)

"That was the first time I had worked for a metered market, where you live or die by the daily ratings," McFeaters recalls. "You lead with crime. I always understood the thing about ratings, because I'm a very competitive person, and I love to be first. But being number one revolved around the lowest common denominator, and I got disgusted with it. But how could I argue, because we were doing really well?"

The solution, McFeaters thought, was to leave the business. She reached the nadir, she says, with a story about bestiality; she'd rather not recall the details. But in plotting her escape from WSOC, she discovered by accident that KVUE had an opening. Her boss there would be Carole Kneeland, a respected broadcast veteran who happened to share McFeaters's concerns about crime coverage.

Kneeland, who is forty-seven, was the capital bureau chief for nearly eleven years for Dallas's WFAA-TV before becoming KVUE's news director in 1989. Like McFeaters, she has long been concerned about what she calls local TV's over-coverage of crime and disaster. For her, a story that KVUE ran last fall seemed to crystallize the issue. A pickup truck swerved off the highway and into the playground of a day care center, killing a child. It was a poignant story, but it happened in California. The story ran in Austin and elsewhere for one reason: the heartbreaking video of the little body lying on the playground.

Not long after that, Kneeland and McFeaters began putting together their crime-coverage concept. The station has been convening monthly community meetings for the previous year, and from those meetings they already knew that the coverage of crime and violence was a persistent viewer complaint.

"We wouldn't even have to ask about it specifically," Kneeland says. "We'd say, ‘What do you think about local news coverage?' The first thing they'd always react with was, ‘It's too violent. It's too sensational.' Or, ‘There's too much crime coverage with no significance.' "

"I remember talking to Carol, and I said, just jokingly, ‘I just wonder what would happen if no one covered crime?' " McFeaters recalls. "It wasn't like a mission of mine or anything; it was almost out of spite for Charlotte."

It was also a marketing strategy, she admits. "That is not why we are doing it, but that's certainly a part of it. I felt sure that people would appreciate this and would watch us because of it."

The two women encouraged the news staff to begin analyzing how - and why - the station was covering crime stories. "The reasons [reporters] gave about why something ought to be covered - ‘Somebody ought to do something about that!' or ‘It affects the community' - gradually became the categories," Kneeland recalls. Informal criteria evolved over a period of three or four months.

 The station's general manager, Ardyth Diercks at the time, signed off on the experiment in early December; Kneeland and McFeaters laid the final guidelines out for the staff on January 10. With a promotion barrage and explanatory spots during the newscasts, the station put the plan into
 practice a week and a half later.

A number of viewers complain that they got tired
 of hearing about the new approach. Indeed, until March, the explanation and promotion of the new guidelines were woven right into the newscast. A crime story typically concluded with a graphic of the new guidelines, with big red check marks on which guidelines the story was deemed to have met. There were oral explanations as well. "Today's marijuana bust is an example of a crime-fighting or crime-prevention effort, one of the guidelines we're using now to change the way we cover crime," anchor Judy Maggio told her viewers in February. "The project is KVUE Listens To You On Crime. We're still going to cover crime, but we're doing it in a less violent and sensational way. We would like to hear your feedback." She went on to say that she and "Bob" - co-anchor Bob Karstens - would host a discussion about the station's new crime-coverage philosophy on America Online that evening.

The response to the experiment itself has been overwhelmingly positive. "A big congratulations to KVUE for the efforts to keep unimportant violence off television. . ." reads a typical fax. "We are not interested in gory details about who got smeared on the interstate, who got murdered, etc." reads another.

Austin Police Chief Elizabeth Watson, an outspoken advocate of community policing in this rapidly growing city of more than half a million people, also endorses KVUE's new approach, while she is critical of K-EYE's razzle-dazzle. "I think that it is commendable for a major TV news station to really take a look at responsible reporting, commendable from a community service standpoint," she says. "Sensationalized reporting fuels fear. It makes people feel powerless."

But when does "responsible reporting," to use Chief Watson's term, become a kind of cheerleading for local law enforcement or a device for self-censorship? In the first few weeks of the experiment, the station seemed to be blurring the distinction between straight reporting and being "a responsible member of the community." Its incessant efforts to tease out crime-prevention tips in every story often sounded more like police public-service announcements than news stories.

 "We've got these neat little guidelines," reporter Kim Barnes says, "which means we've got to give a solution, so let's give some tips. My concern is that so much of our focus and concern is on getting the sidebar [the crime-prevention tips] that we're not getting the who, what, when, and where - which is our primary job."

Some viewers consider the KVUE experiment an effort to avoid reality. "Grow up," one viewer urged in another fax. "The world is violent. Your ignorance of it doesn't make it less violent. It only makes it more palatable to you when you stick your heads in the sand."

A similar objection came from Joe Phelps, pastor of an American Baptist church in an Austin suburb. "Frankly," the minister wrote in an op-ed piece that ran in the Austin American-Statesman, "hearing about violence is the least we can do to remain connected with our fellow citizens, our kin, who experience such tragedy. The reporting should not be sensationalized. Pictures may not always be appropriate. But the reality that people kill and are killed on a regular basis is newsworthy. We need to hear it."

Competitor K-EYE, meanwhile, is trying to make a little ratings hay with that no-crime perception of KVUE. "Is your newscast giving you all the news?" K-EYE's latest promo asks, a not-so-subtle dig at KVUE's highly publicized
 crime diet.

For Kneeland, McFeaters, and others at KVUE, the perception that the station no longer covers crime has been frustrating. When critics call, Mike George takes pains to explain the distinction the station makes between covering a crime story and airing it. His reporters listen to the police scanner just as they always have, he explains, and they still investigate crime and violence. But after they've asked the questions and nosed around the crime scene, they now have to decide whether the story is worth putting on the air. And if it's worth putting on the air, is it worth "packaging," giving it the full story-and-pictures approach? "This policy makes us think about the way we cover crime," George says. "It's just like any other story: we ask the question ‘Why is this important?' "

"What we're trying to get away from is an automatic response to the way we cover crime," McFeaters says. "We're not trying to deny the ugliness in the world; that's not what this is about. However, we have a responsibility not to give that ugliness more play than it deserves."

McFeaters draws a sharp distinction between what KVUE is doing and the "family-sensitive" approach, pioneered by WCCO-TV in Minneapolis, one of a handful of stations around the country that are spurning violent, manipulative, and emotion-laden newscasts. The Minneapolis station pledges that its 5 p.m. newscast will never contain material that a family with children watching would find offensive. To McFeaters, such a pledge is a gimmick, in effect a kind of self-censorship. The Minneapolis station, she says, allowed the perception to develop that it had, in effect, "gone soft" on crime. She doesn't want that to happen to KVUE, and the station's promotional efforts are aimed at heading off that notion.

 It is a Monday night toward the end of February, and McFeaters and Knee-land have called a meeting of the newsroom staff to assess their experiment. Minutes after anchors Bob Karstens and Judy Maggio wrap up the 6 p.m. newscast with a bit of happy chat with weatherman Mark Murray, the staff gathers around a white oval table in the corner of the large, airy newsroom. Behind them, floor-to-ceiling inverted-V windows in a stark white wall offer views of suburban Austin at dusk.

 Maggio and Karstens sit side-by-side at one end of the table, just as they do on the set. Reporters, editors, producers, directors, news managers, engineers, and photographers, a couple of dozen in all, slouch in chairs and on desks or lean against the wall around the table. Several of their colleagues scurry about the newsroom getting ready for the 10 p.m. newscast. It's a youthful-looking group; the average age is probably under thirty.

Three video cameras record the gathering as McFeaters opens the meeting with a videotape of another gathering - a viewer focus group that had met several times over a two-month period. The seven members of this group - young and old; black, white, and brown; male and female - are thoughtful and articulate and uniformly supportive of the station's crime-coverage experiment. "I have to be perfectly honest," says Ora Houston, a grandmotherly African-American woman. "I have not missed the crime or the mayhem or the stabbings. It's like my life is much more settled, it's calmer. We know crime's going on. In our neighborhood, we're trying to be pro-active about it, but we don't need to see it every day."

 The tape ends. Standing in the shadows away from the table, McFeaters says, "Let's start with some of your frustrations."

A reporter replies: "Sometimes it's difficult when there's something you're not covering, and you know the other stations are covering it, and you wonder whether you're doing your job." Another says she worries about digging for the deeper angle and slighting the "who, what, when, where, why. Are we fulfilling our core responsibility?" Someone else, expanding on the thought, suggests a billboard-type graphic that would display such information, without pictures. Somebody else comments that "People are saying, ‘Oh, y'all are the station that doesn't cover crime anymore.' "

"One of the frustrations is that we've made the decision that this particular life is more important than another one," reporter and weekend anchor Wendy Erikson says. "A family is out there saying, ‘My family deserved at least a fifteen-second notice.' "

"Of course, we make those decisions all the time," McFeaters replies, "when we don't report the death of someone with AIDS or cancer or a baby that's died of SIDS." She adds that the only strong complaint she's heard about the experiment is about the promotion. "They're saying, ‘All right, already! Quit telling us what you're going to do and just do it!' "

 The group discusses ratings and how long the experiment might last if ratings slip. "Hypothetically, what if it costs us number one?" asks reporter Greg Groogan, surveying the faces of his colleagues. "Do we stand on principle, or do we backtrack?" Groogan urges taking a stand.

"I think we do have a more intelligent group of people here in Austin than in other cities," Carole Kneeland says, "so if it can work anywhere, I think it will work here."

Everyone around the table on Monday night was keenly aware that the experiment had undergone its most severe test just a day earlier, February 25. Groogan, who usually covers politics and investigative projects, had been doing weekend duty as part of a skeleton staff. He had arrived at work on Sunday thinking that he had made it through more than a month of the experiment without having to make a critical news judgment. A few minutes later he and photographer Chris Davis were rushing to the scene of a shooting at an apartment complex for married students at the University of Texas.

 "We confirmed that there were three dead on the scene," he recalls, "and the thought process began right then. ‘Is this going to meet the guidelines? If this was murder, was the murderer still at large? Was there an issue of public safety?' "

It seemed that a graduate student in engineering had shot his wife and four-year-old daughter and then turned the gun on himself. "We had a hook," Groogan says. "It was the first murder on UT properties since the Charles Whitman shootings from the UT tower in 1966. That wasn't a bad hook, but that wasn't going to cut it under our new guidelines."

Meanwhile, University of Texas police had found a weapon and told Groogan they had a 911 tape of the woman calling for help. Campus police were slow to provide much more, and the 5:30 newscast was looming. "We still weren't there," Groogan recalls, "at least for the early show."

If not for the guidelines, Groogan would already have been back at the station with a story in the can. Viewers might not have seen body bags, as they did on K-EYE that evening, but they might have heard the 911 tape and gotten the details about three violent deaths. Now, however, Groogan couldn't find a justification for airing the story: there was no immediate threat to the community, the crime itself was solved, and there was really nothing to say about prevention. There seemed to be no significant community impact; the family was new to the apartment complex, and the neighbors barely knew them. The guideline about children? In this case, the child was dead.

Back at the station, Sunday anchor Wendy Erikson had another killing on her hands, and another decision about the guidelines - an apparent drive-by shooting on Austin's predominantly black and Hispanic east side that had taken place late Saturday night. The suspect was in custody, there was no threat to children, no threat to the community.

 "We were between a rock and a hard place," Groogan says. "With our limited weekend staff, we could follow both stories and still not get them on the air. We called Carole at home."

Erikson, thirty, is from suburban Chicago, where, she says, "I grew up watching death and destruction" on TV. She would have aired both Sunday stories without a second thought - before the experiment. Now she found herself in something of an ironic situation. Kneeland wanted to run the drive-by shooting story, but Erikson didn't believe it met the criteria Kneeland herself had developed. "Our credibility is on the line," Erikson told her boss.

"Carole told us to start digging on both, looking for larger issues," Groogan recalls. "She said, ‘We cannot drop these stories. If we don't go on the air, that's the price we pay, but we cannot use these guidelines as an excuse not to cover them. Our job is to gather facts and then decide whether to air. The guidelines are not an excuse for not doing the nuts-and-bolts job of reporting.' "

Groogan and other reporters dug. Although neither story made the 5:30 newscast (except for a brief mention of the East Austin murder), Erikson fully aired them both at 10.

The story of the apparent murder/suicide at the university apartment complex focused on the immediate community's response to the tragedy. The residents of the apartment complex gathered at sunset on a playground and talked over what had happened, among themselves and with Groogan. Groogan also listened as counselors talked to the residents about signs of domestic abuse, which was an issue in the investigation, and what they could do to help prevent it.

 Groogan believes that the guidelines forced him to stay with the story, and that this extra effort paid off in context and perspective. "In this place," Groogan reported at 10 that night, "where small children are constantly at play, there is a new fear - a fear of guns. They're supposed to be illegal on all university property. Residents wonder if other neighbors have ignored the ban." The visuals were subdued - the apartment complex, children playing there, and, from a distance, the residents in discussion.

KVUE also determined that the other shooting, in East Austin, had significant community impact as well, and in ways KVUE might have missed had it covered the incident simply as a drive-by shooting. Groogan and reporter Robbie Owens - who was pulled off another story to explore the community's response - discovered a predominantly black neighborhood eager to let the rest of Austin know that this was not just another stereotypical incident. "Although this is a terrible time for Bobby Reed's family and friends, they want Austin to know that this was not a gang shooting or a crack deal gone bad," Robbie Owens explained on the air. "It was a family gathered - laughing, talking, and eating enchiladas. Then, witnesses say a white man pulled up, exchanged some words - including a racial slur aimed at the black family gathering. They say he then fired a shotgun, hitting two people, one of them Bobby Reed, who died. But tonight some family and friends say their concern right now is not about hatred, but about loss.&qu

"We had a family pleading for peace, and the community impacted was more than just that block where he lived," Cathy McFeaters says. "It was all of East Austin, all of black Austin."

"I believe that Sunday night newscast was a litmus test," Groogan says. "To Wendy's credit and to our producers' credit, they didn't want to be hypocrites. To Carol's credit, she sensed that by digging a little deeper and looking a little wider, we could still cover those stories without breaking our commitment."

Wendy Erikson still feels a little unsettled by that Sunday experience, however. On the earlier newscasts, "all other stations aired both stories," she recalls, "and I was literally anchoring and feeling that we weren't covering crime. We had four people dead on a quiet Sunday, and we weren't covering it. I've been taught to present the facts, and now I'm in this position where I'm having to decide whether this particular story is something I feel viewers should see.

"I'm in transition," she adds. "I'm uncomfortable with the guidelines right now, but part of me does feel very good thinking I may somehow be contributing to a change in our society."

Is changing society a journalistic concern? Can new journalistic guidelines also be promotional vehicles? And can thoughtful coverage of important local issues, crime included, compete with gripping images of maimed victims and distraught relatives? "Crime is punctuation," anchor Bob Karstens says. "It grips people. It's hard-edged. The challenge for us is to find stories with the same hard edge that aren't crime stories." McFeaters, who takes pride in the flashy Florida TV tricks she picked up in Jacksonville, believes KVUE can offer good journalism and good TV.

She acknowledges that ratings will ultimately determine the fate of KVUE's experiment, but she hopes the station doesn't rush to judgment. "They usually give news directors and anchors two or three years, football coaches two or three seasons before they off 'em," she says. "I don't think you draw any conclusions by one book." If ratings slip, McFeaters says she'll blame the presentation, not the concept, and she'll press to keep trying.

 "We characterize it as an experiment, because it is," she says, but adds, "It's not an experiment in the sense that there's an end to this; it's not a one-shot deal. There's no way that at the end of the month Carole or I can walk out into the newsroom and announce, ‘OK, now we can start covering crime the way we were.' This newsroom is forever changed. Everyone is going to look at how they cover crime differently from now on."

The February ratings came out in mid-March. They were KVUE's best ever. The station increased its already-solid ratings lead for every newscast, reaching its highest numbers in a decade for its 10 p.m. show. The crime-coverage experiment continues.

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