October 20, 2005
Crime and Punishment
I will be completely honest. I did not enjoy the unit on crime reporting. But there is value to this form of news writing. First, the public needs to be informed of crime and needs to know if the justice system is working. Second, scandal sells. This may seem cynical, but in a capitalist society, even the papers are ruled by corporations. We're not out to discover the truth, we're out to sell papers. Sex and violence sells. Therefore, we must cover crime.
But the most important issue in crime reporting is the one I mentioned in class: people need that sense of closure.
When we bombard readers with the gory, juicy details of crimes, they need to know how the bloody fiasco ends. It seems the American media consumers are reminiscent of those in the play-turned-movie Chicago. Heaven knows the subject of the media changes as quickly in real life as in the movie.
This is what keeps people coming back for more papers (and what gives the CEOs of newspaper industries their wealth). Closure is what keeps us reading the novels we buy, the movies we watch, and the plays we see. People generally want justice to prevail or at least be informed when it doesn't.
The catchy headline and the excruciatingly juicy details of the story get the reader to pick up the paper, but the search for closure keeps the reader coming back.
Posted by EvanReynolds at October 20, 2005 8:41 PM
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Comments
I think I must not have been clear enough. I am not for “pushing closure.” In fact, I am for the exact opposite. This may seem contradictory to what I was saying in the post. I am all too concerned that the “medium is the massage.” The media are giving people what they want to hear, not what they need to hear.
The reason there is a culture of closure and even worse, escapism, is the pervasive consumerist ideologies forwarded by capitalism. The more you can get people to shy away from ambiguity and reality, the more people are uncritical of the system of production. The more uncritical, the more easily exploited.
As for trials and executions, I completely agree. Justice is never served for anyone when a crime is committed, even if the offender is punished. I’m not trying to suggest that this is right or wrong… I am just stating that it is.
I was really trying to be sardonic with this post. .. I guess it didn’t fly very well :( But, to sum up the message I wanted to get across: bring ambiguity back into the news.
Posted by: Evan at June 18, 2006 6:49 PM
I absolutely disagree with this idea that we need to keep pushing “closure”. No other term grates more on the sensibilities of crime victims and yet we reporters keep prattling on about it at trials and executions. We recently ran an editorial on the subject: http://www.newsreview.com/reno/Content?oid=oid%3A57440
Posted by: Dennis Myers at June 16, 2006 8:30 PM