Prime Suspects: The Influence of Local Television News on the Viewing Public

Abstract

Local television news is the public’s primary source of public affairs information. News stories about crime dominate local news programming because they meet the demand for “action news.”. The prevalence of this type of reporting has led to a crime narrative or “script ” that includes two core elements: crime is violent and perpetrators of crime are non-white males. We show that this script has become an ingrained heuristic for understanding crime and race. Using a multi-method design, we assess the impact of the crime script on the viewing public. Our central finding is that exposure to the racial element of the crime script increases support for punitive approaches to crime and heightens negative attitudes about African-Americans among white, but not black, viewers. In closing, we consider the implications of our results for intergroup relations, electoral politics, and the practice of journalism. 2Local television news is America’s principal window on the world. Surveys of television viewing (e.g., Roper-Starch, 1994), hours of daily programming (Papper and Gerhard, 1997) and the actual share of the viewing audience captured by local newscasts (Hess, 1991), all demonstrate the dominance of local news. In fact, people can watch live local news almost anytime-- mornings, afternoons, evenings, prime time, and late night. As the amount of news time has increased, so has