STUDY SAYS MEDIA'S CRIME REPORTING DISTORTS REALITY

The national news media vastly overreport the incidents of crime, particularly when youth and minorities are involved says a new analysis by a Washington, DC-based youth advocacy group. As a result, the American public and government policy-makers get a distorted view of actual crime.

According to the study, "Off Balance: Youth, Race, Crime in the News," conducted by Building Blocks for Youth, television newscasts are the most likely to overreport crime news, followed by radio and newspapers.

Between 1990 and 1998, for example, television news coverage of murders rose 473 percent although the nation's homicide rate dropped 32 percent during that time frame. As for youth crime, even though such crime is at its lowest in a generation, overcoverage in the news has led 62 percent of adults to believe that juvenile crime is increasing.

Another example cited by the study concerned school shootings. Despite a one in two million chance of a high school student being killed in school, highly publicized media reports of school shootings resulted in 71 percent of the public believing such an incident was likely in their community. "The most profound finding is not just that media coverage is going up while crime is going down, not just that African American and Hispanic youths are overdepicted as criminals and as victims, but that it's all three at once," said Vincent Schiaraldi of the Justice Policy Institute and a co-author of the report. "It's a misinformation synergy," he said.