The author asks: Ever notice how common crimes like theft get little news coverage, but there's always an abundance of coverage for events that rarely occur in our daily lives? Watch video
By Gary C. Woodward
You probably already know that we're four times more likely to be struck by lightning than from a terrorist attack. You wouldn't know that by watching or reading the news, though.
It's a problem I call a "news inversion" -- when a story about a limited number of usual events seems to signal a cataclysm of huge proportions.
The more media coverage a crime story gets, the less likely that its crime category represents a serious threat to other citizens.
This is generally true for New Jersey.
Take murder, for example. Any unnecessary death is one too many, of course. And yet, the state was somewhat below the national average with 337 homicides in 2014. Even so, murder as a subject was mentioned over 6,400 times in an 11 month period in just one source: NJ.Com.
That holds true for suicides, as well. The state experienced 757 last year -- among the lowest per capita rates in the nation -- but it got nearly 4,000 mentions in the same database, and extended air time from area broadcasters focused on particular cases, many involving New Jersey residents.
This isn't an entirely new phenomenon. Political communication scholar Doris Graber published a study of crime news, using stories found in The Chicago Tribune ("Mass Media and American Politics," 1993). In her study, the most reported category was murder, which in 1991 was 0.3 percent (925) of all the crimes documented in the city's Uniform Crime Report. But in the Tribune murders got 64 percent of the coverage.
More common crimes, such as theft, got comparatively little coverage.
Think of CNN's current preoccupation with global terrorism. It is both a serious problem and seriously over-covered, at least in relation of other pressing world concerns.
News inversions tend to convert a single example into a rule. Our brains are hardwired to want to generalize to the whole from a few specific cases. In communication terms, this is the function of a synecdoche, a fancy word for the straightforward idea that we like to use a single case to stand for the whole.
It's one of the most efficient rhetorical tropes a news organization can employ. Using it one might conclude that the 1999 actions of mass murderers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School in Colorado points to what is wrong with children raised in affluent suburbs. But perhaps there is no link at all.
As with this case, there is always an abundance of experts ready to take the bait of television notoriety to speculate on what an event like this "means" to the nation. Most commentators cannot resist the synecdoche. It makes the world simpler.
It makes for good television.
And it saves the expert from the potentially embarrassing but intellectually honest assessment that a given case, even a mass murder, is perhaps significant of nothing.
The truth is that seriously deviant individuals engage in acts with unknowable causes, following a vague string of logic known only to them. But to actually say that is to leave the third act of a traumatic episode unwritten. And so we write social significance scripts based on mostly unrepresentative cases.
This explains the endless panic mode of the 24/7 "Breaking news" cycle. Everything covered is urgent. Everything represents an early warning of a bigger and ominous trend.
How do we counteract this compulsion to find meaning and at the same time maintain our own sense of equilibrium?
Step back. Tune out. The world is not ending.
The awful events documented and reported on a given day are often only going to make true sense as single aberrations, mostly useless in making generalizations about long-term trends in American life or the global culture.
More specifically, limit you time and your children spend in the presence of television news reporting. This is especially important for seniors, who typically gorge themselves on video and TV news.
We have good evidence that, like most of us, older Americans generally over-estimate how dangerous their community and the world really is.
Gary C. Woodward is a Professor of Communication Studies at The College of New Jersey and most recently the author of "The Rhetoric of Intention in Human Affairs." He blogs at theperfectresponse.com.
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