The Fallout From Too Much Crime Coverage   

Scooped! How the Media Have Missed the Real Story on Crime While Chasing 'Crime Waves,' Sleaze, and Celebrities
By David J. Krajicek
Columbia University Press

Scooped! How the Media Have Missed the Real Story on Crime While Chasing 'Crime Waves,' Sleaze, and Celebrities
By David J. Krajicek
Columbia University Press
224 pages; $24.95

Like many new hires, I served time on the police beat at my first daily, so I was taken aback to find David Krajicek branding cop reporters as "the catfish of the newsroom."

But when you think about it he is on to something. Police reporters, he maintains, are "more blue collar than blue blood," typically young, under-trained, overworked beeper wearers who "traffic in human misery and deviance," loners and ambulance chasers who "do not have the patience or disposition to make good Cub Scout leaders and T-ball coaches."

Himself a longtime New York Daily News cop reporter, Krajicek knows the territory. In "Scooped," he manages a paradoxical feat, writing a serious, worthy critique of police coverage in the brassy-sassy lingo of the tabloid trade.

The book is not so much an assault on police reporters as it is an unsparing critique of police reporting, which Krajicek calls "drive-by journalism — a ton of anecdote and graphic detail about individual cases drawn from the police blotter but not an ounce of leavening context to help frame and explain crime."

"We are left," he concludes, "with a population that knows everything about Amy Fisher but next to nothing about the development of our national criminal justice policies."

Crime has always been big. Since James Gordon Bennett discovered that blood and guts sell, the press has delivered a daily deluge of what Krajicek calls "blood-stained and sexy news," to the point that he says it typically fills a third of the newspaper and up to half of local TV news shows.

But Krajicek's main concern is that a "mutation" in journalism has triggered an unprecedented "blood lust in the mass media," sucking prestige papers into an obsession with celebrity crime and "grandmother murders" that used to be left to sensation hounds.

Krajicek even offers up a villain, Rupert Murdoch, claiming that his TV show, "A Current Affair," instigated a generation of "peeping-tom journalism." Tabloid television would publicize some sordid and steamy story, giving the so-called legitimate media an excuse to dive into it. Murdoch's New York Post, it should be noted, is a competitor of the paper where Krajicek worked, as is Newsday, which the author also criticizes as crime news-infested.

But his point seems strong, and he reinforces it by reciting a nonstop roll call of headline makers that have dominated coverage for a decade now: "William Kennedy Smith, the 'Florida Nympho,' the Menendez brothers, Joey Buttafuoco-Amy Fisher, Woody and Mia, Tonya Harding, Heidi Fleiss, the Bobbitts, Michael Jackson." Not to mention O.J. Simpson.

"Crime news is inexpensive to produce, and it attracts readers and viewers," he explains. Worse, "the newsroom culture holds crime reporting to a lower standard than that for other beats."

Worst of all, to Krajicek, is the impact the allure of the lurid has on public attitudes and public policy. Endless crime coverage, he believes, distorts the true crime picture, alarms the citizenry, and goads politicians toward quick-and-dirty responses. Enjoying a salacious story or two might be "written off as a harmless diversion..except that politicians and law enforcement authorities often set crime policy in response to the week's marquee story."

"Instead of rational tempered stories that might help explain the vexing crime problem," the media flood us with "raw dispatches..the prurient murder of the month." Society responds with "costly and misguided crime policy decisions," a get-tough spasm of mandatory sentences and petty-crime crackdowns that overload prisons but don't, in the author's view, address basic flaws in the criminal justice system.

You don't have to agree with everything Krajicek says to see his point.

As someone who began covering crime in 1977 at the Council Bluffs, Iowa, Daily Nonpareil and who for years ran the New York Daily News police headquarters bureau, Kracijek has written his share of the stories that worry him: "Mom Held in Fatal Scalding," "B'Klyn Boy Set Ablaze," "For 'Nice Girl,' A Date with Death" and the like. He estimates that 10,000 people were murdered in New York during his tenure on the beat.

Now, as a Columbia University journalism professor, he presents some proposals for rolling back the crime news wave. He wants the elite media to reduce "sleaze and sensationalism." He favors creating criminal justice beats, separate from daily crime chas^ng, so re- porters can examine crime policy as seriously as they do politics or the economy.

Most powerfully, he offers a simple plea, both to conscience and self-interest. Because of tabloidization, serious journalists have "lost their grip on respect, trust, and confidence" of readers. Winning it back may not be just a moral imperative, but an economic one as well.