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INTRODUCTION

For months leading up to the election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States, news coverage of the bitter campaign included references to crime in general and murder rates across the country, in particular. Chicago was often emphasized by President Trump as an example of a city where shootings were out of control. Trump and his opponent, Hillary Clinton, used social media, particularly Twitter, to fawn for votes while lambasting the press (Trump more so than Clinton), and journalists were often ridiculed by Trump when he disliked coverage he received.

But, news coverage is sifted and strained before it is disseminated. Most people have no idea that the information that is provided to us from television, radio, and newspaper reporters has been filtered through a sieve of newsroom gatekeepers who decide what’s news and what isn’t. This has always been the case. But today, that process of deciding, as an example, which murder stories to cover and which to ignore, has become an accepted practice.

As a television news reporter in Chicago since 1973, I have observed the process change, almost beyond recognition. Sadly, serious journalism in many newsrooms has morphed into “infotainment” — a disgraceful portmanteau that illustrates the inexorable decline of standards that are inherent in the press and that buttress the protections established in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

When I began working in television in 1970, the practice of using official “sources” was the established way to authenticate information to be “truthful” and was an accepted manner of verifying information. For decades, assignment editors, producers, and city desk editors allowed establishment “hacks” — the PR spokesperson, or the PIO (public information officer) from police departments across the country — to give self-aggrandizing explanations of events that, most of the time, the newsroom gatekeepers accepted as fact.

So, up until five or ten years ago, when battered and abused people complained to reporters that they had been beaten, kicked, and knocked around by arresting police officers, most of the time reporters ignored the complaints, feeling that the subjects were just disgruntled revenge seekers who were angry that they had been arrested in the first place.

Now, we can pinpoint to the day, the time in American history, when newsroom personnel across the country were shocked into reality. It was the moment, a quarter of a century ago, when video was broadcast of LA police officers, using nightsticks, beating motorist Rodney King on March 3, 1991. Since then, police misconduct has resulted in several officers being prosecuted while the public has watched, over and over again, as dashboard cameras and body cam videos have exposed the questionable brutality of certain police officers during stressful encounters.

The Rodney King video was stunning to watch. First of all, no one in our newsroom could believe that police officers could take part in such a violent action. King was on the ground most of the time while officers pummeled and kicked him into submission — it was shocking. I remember that we initially thought it must have been a scene from a movie being shot in LA. We refused to believe that the video we were watching with our own eyes could be true.

Yet, by 2015 and 2016, protest marches had become commonplace in the streets of many major American cities. A new movement, with the chant “Black Lives Matter,” has drawn marchers to the doorsteps of police departments, and leaders have demanded that change take place and officers desist from exercising deadly force so quickly. Counter marchers from “Blue Lives Matter” (a group supporting police) have clashed with Black Lives Matter, and near riots have resulted.

All this might not have happened so swiftly and with such explosive and revolutionary force if there hadn’t been video of the incidents. The public could, for the first time, see in unbelievable clarity that atrocities could and do take place — and in all likelihood had been occurring all along. Reporters and editors had, for decades, elected to believe the establishment version of events as if they were gospel. Now, these same filterers were faced with an uncomfortable reality that journalists could no longer just take the word of administrative mouthpieces without also considering the other side of the story, too.

When I decided to write this book, I realized that it would be easier for the public to digest if I narrowed my discussion of journalist decision making to just one element of reporting: news coverage of murders. In some respects, the treatment of murder is the perfect way to analyze how newsrooms work in getting information out to the public. And while the method of information dispersal has changed over the years — Facebook, Twitter, cell phone video, and other social media apps all come to mind — one fact remains unchanged: murders are detestable, abhorrent crimes that many times draw police and their critics together in search for the perpetrator. Later on in the book I will discuss police misconduct and its effect on murder coverage in more detail.

When you ask judges, mayors, chiefs of police, and ordinary citizens about combatting crime in Chicago — specifically shootings and gun deaths— the first reaction is a blank stare followed by a side-to-side head shake. After a moment or two you hear, “I don’t know what the hell is going on—it’s just crazy.”

The out of control gun violence in Chicago has erupted today because of policies put in place decades ago. The gun-happy teens who are shooting each other in cold-blooded, pitiless fashion have been trained and encouraged by repeat offender gang leaders. The invisible leaders — the generals who run the gangs—have spent nearly all their lives in the “gray bar university penitentiaries” that have been their training grounds for learning how to commit crimes more skillfully each time they recidivate and later return to the streets.

On the other side of the equation are the men and women in blue who are sworn to uphold the law and bring the shooters to justice — getting them off the streets so law-abiding citizens can live in peace. The clear majority of these officers are good, sensitive, caring men and women who place their lives on the line each day to maintain the peace. And therein lies the problem. The conflict between both sides has reached the boiling point, and tensions in many inner-city neighborhoods are frayed and can break loose at any time, resulting in rioting and disorder.

Monitoring this uneasy dance between police and the communities they are sworn to protect is the press. Journalists assume the responsibility of carefully watching communities as social forces exert extreme pressures on some areas: crime, unemployment, rival violent street gangs, and other negative factors that undermine the abilities of residents to live congenial lifestyles. 

But — and here is the tragedy — in many major American cities, the public rarely gets a true picture of these neighborhoods and the people who struggle, by the hour, just to survive and eke out an existence. Media outlets rarely spend the necessary amount of time in these sorrowful neighborhoods telling the gritty tales of survival that go on in millions of homes around the country. These stories are ignored and forgotten.

Likewise, the stories of successful minority families who, by the untold thousands, have become happy middle- and upper-class citizens rarely have their stories told. We seldom hear the inspiring tales of African American Big Ten or Ivy League graduates who have become titans of business and industry. Instead, the exploits of a small 2 percent — the destructive “gangbangers” — dominate the headlines and lead off each newscast.

This book will take you behind the scenes as news workers — who in the vast majority of cases are hardworking, diligent journalists — make everyday, split-second decisions about the murder coverage you’ll receive and the incidents you’ll never hear about.

Yet even though journalists work hard to give accurate reports during news coverage, at a morning rally in Atkinson, New Hampshire, Donald Trump, during his presidential campaign, criticized media outlets, as he often did. “They’re scum,” Trump said. “They’re horrible people. They are so illegitimate. They are just terrible people.”1 While Trump is not referencing crime coverage, per se, he did often complain about big-city crime. His disparaging remarks about the press can affect the way murders are covered. Ironically, Trump forgets that he is a byproduct of the media himself.

Some argue that it is not journalists’ responsibility to drive social change. Instead, according to this viewpoint, reporters are merely conduits through which information flows out to the masses. But I feel that approach is a “cop-out” since, in reality, the stories journalists report do have an impact and can influence public policy and affect the way we think and perceive others to be. Reporters understand this and often work to craft their stories to avoid showing partiality.

Journalists know the dangers of muzzling the press, and countless reporters have lost their lives while trying to inform the public about matters that authoritarian governments wish to squelch. So, it is with that philosophy in mind that I approached this book—to hopefully stimulate discussion about how media outlets cover murder in the news.