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ABSTRACT:
Crime has fallen in the United States in the past eight years, yet public opinion polls indicate that crime and public safety are overriding concerns of citizens in communities. Polls also tell us that a significant majority of our citizens get most of their information from local television news and, in general, they believe what they are being shown and told. In short, these newscasts play a pre-eminent role in the social construction of reality and, by extension, in forming the cognitive maps that citizens use to understand their communities. This article examines how the press, particularly local television news, portrays the urban/suburban dimensions of crime in 20 television markets across the US. It is a major extension of an earlier study of two markets. Findings show that local newscasts in the markets consistently focused on suburban crime in spite of the fact that the suburban crime rate was about one-half of the crime rate of urban areas. The newscasts also regularly conveyed the message that the city was a dangerous place.