A Call for the Daily Death Page   

While the media are constantly criticized for focusing too heavily on violence, news organizations attempting to responsibly cover murder and mayhem in American communities are at somewhat of a loss.

One idea that might help the media lose their vulture-like reputation is the creation of "death pages" and "death channels" aimed at diminishing the entertainment value of violence and providing a more information- and solution-oriented approach. Ironically, this approach would give the coverage of violent and accidental deaths and injuries even more prominence. Yet the idea is not as farfetched as it might seem and could have a positive impact.

One purpose of a death and injury section would be to put violent and accident-related news items into a larger context. For example, a news briefs section with a short article about a young boy injured while playing with his father's loaded gun might also include information about the number of children who are injured or die under similar circumstances, along with reports about the current status of legislation aimed at putting child-proof guards on guns.

ün article about a local woman raped by a stranger might also provide information about other rapes in that neighborhood, comparing the statistical likelihood of such incidents with the likelihood of a person being raped by acquaintances or family members.
While some newspapers cover criminal justice as a beat, a death and injury section would expand coverage of violence beyond the criminal justice and law enforcement arenas to include a public health perspective. For example, traditional coverage of a murder includes information about who was murdered, by what method, the identity of the alleged perpetrator and whether or not he or she is in police custody. In a death and injury section, the same story would address other factors that may have induced the violence, such as the occupations and income levels of both the victim and the perpetrator.

The media's traditional, often sensationalized, approach to violence routinely overlooks factors that epidemiologists and public health officials say contribute to its prevalence. For example, when the Los Angeles riots exploded in 1992, the media emphasized tensions between Korean Americans and African Americans in South Central Los Angeles. But a study by the University of Southern California School of Medicine linking the high number of liquor stores in L.A. County with the increase in violent crime might have been a more pertinent angle. According to the study, most L.A. County census tracts had more than twice the number of liquor stores prescribed by law.

Death pages could serve a practical purpose. By focusing on underlying trends and broadening coverage, death pages would enable readers to relate news events to concerns for their own safety, as well as the safety of their families and their communities. A good example is the murder of Carol Stuart in Boston in late 1989.

The media swarmed around the story after Stuart's husband falsely claimed the couple had been attacked by a black man. What the media neglected to report was that the likelihood of a white woman being murdered by a black man in Massachusetts is the same as that of being hit by lightning – about one in 4 million – and that the overwhelming majority of homicides in the United States are intraracial. Had the media provided context, the resulting hysteria might not have erupted.

This proposed style of coverage could easily be adapted to television and radio with the creation of a 24-hour "Death Channel." Programming could be seg-
mented into various categories, such as reports on murder, suicide, rape and assault; the human costs of war; accidental deaths, including airplane and automobile crashes and natural disasters.

Sports is entertainment. Murders, rapes and assaults are not. But the popularity of local television news programs that churn out one out-of-context death and injury report after another, the plethora of "real life" cop shows and the number of column inches allotted to reports of death and destruction play only to an adrenaline rush of fear, not to the needs of an informed public.