Journalist and filmmaker Yvonne Latty did not mince words in criticizing the traditional journalism approach to covering crime at a March 3 panel discussion hosted by the Ethics and Journalism Initiative at New York University.
“Gun violence is a public health issue,” said Latty, the inaugural director of Temple University’s Logan Center for Urban Investigative Reporting. “But the way that we cover gun violence? I’ll say it: It is so racist.”
Latty and her fellow panelists – New York journalist and author Graham Rayman and Beth Schwartzapfel, who covers criminal justice for The Marshall Project – agreed that lurid, tabloid-style reporting on individual crimes ultimately does not serve news audiences well.
That kind of reporting, Schwartzapfel said, can imply that neighborhoods are more dangerous than facts would suggest and can reduce both victims and alleged wrongdoers to cardboard cutouts. Reporters scrounging for information about individual crimes, “almost ironically,” Schwartzapfel said, “let people off the hook from looking at the larger systemic problems.”
Rayman, who covered New York City’s police department and criminal justice system for decades, most recently for the Daily News, said reporters all too often forget, in the heat of reporting on a particular crime, that they’re covering one of the worst days in the lives of the victim’s family members.
The gruesome details that reporters obtain from police sources – like how many times a victim was shot or stabbed – will quickly be forgotten by almost all readers and listeners, Rayman said. But a story’s sensationalistic embellishments might forever haunt the victim’s survivors.
“When you’re out there doing this,” Rayman said, “you have to make a calculation and think about, what is the right thing to do here?”
Most importantly, the panelists agreed, coverage that focuses on individual crimes often misses bigger stories about the root causes of violence, its impact on neighborhoods, and how police departments deal with violent crime.
So the big, intertwined questions for reporters on the crime beat, said discussion moderator Stephen Adler, director of the Ethics and Journalism Initiative, are how to write stories that avoid sensationalism and exploitation while also thinking conceptually about coverage that will actually “contribute positively to society.”
Simply using precise language can make a big difference, panel members said. Schwartzapfel told the audience about The Marshall Project’s “Language Project,” which explains, among other things, why her news organization discourages the use of dehumanizing terms such as “prisoner” or “inmate” to refer to incarcerated people.
Rayman, who has written extensively about inhumane conditions at New York City’s infamous pretrial detention center Rikers Island, reeled off a string of offensive words that were once standard at city tabloids, even in describing defendants who had not been convicted: goon, brute, perp, skel. Rayman said that in recent years, he waged a one-man campaign to persuade editors at the Daily News to avoid using the word inmate to describe people behind bars but has noticed the term creeping back into the newspaper’s coverage since his departure last year.
Latty and Rayman also urged audience members not to rely exclusively on police sources. It’s all too easy, Rayman said, to come up with “ready-made stories” by racing around from crime scene to crime scene based on official police announcements. But Ryman also called such coverage “kind of mindless,” telling the audience that he decided early in his career to focus on holding the police department to account rather than prioritizing cozy source relationships with police officials.
Latty exhorted audience members to head into neighborhoods affected by crime, rather than reporting from their phones and computers, and to take time to listen to victims and survivors, rather than rushing to get a soundbite. “The way that I tell all my students to approach it is to practice something called radical empathy, and to look at your own life and try to find some place where you know you can relate to someone who’s experiencing loss,” Latty said. “Look at people in their eyes, don’t look away, and give a lot of space for people to talk.”
Adler and audience members raised the issue of editors’ expectations: How can young reporters take the time to conduct thoughtful interviews and search for deeper stories when editors are pushing for quick turnarounds?
Latty acknowledged that editorial pressure is real – but she said reporters may have more agency than they realize when it comes to decisions about whom to center in a story and what details to include. “No one knows what you have in your pocket,” she said. “In the end, if I gave [editors] something that was good, they published it.”