News at Eleven In The Big City

We all live in the shadow of television. But for me, the connection is even closer. In the suburb of Detroit where I grew up, the major network affiliates and independent television stations made their homes. As I passed by one station or another on my way to school or to the mall, their towering candy cane colored broadcast antennas with blinking red warning lights would stare down upon me as I wondered about what was happening on the other side of their studio walls. As much as automobiles preoccupied the thoughts of many in Detroit, television would continue to fascinate me for I have chosen a life making documentaries.

Back in the seventies, I was a latchkey kid before the term was even coined. While my parents worked at their store, television watched over me. It was my baby-sitter. And I trusted it. My vision of the world was largely informed by what I saw on the tube. As I grew older and traveled around, I would have to learn to reconcile my television images of different cities with their reality. The geographies and peoples of these places never matched my electronic preconceptions. Even though I have learned to create television, I still find myself fighting its power to transform the way I view the world.

As we move further apart from each other with the growth of suburbia, local television news programs act as a glue that binds the diverse citizens of a metropolitan area. Through its use of helicopters, a sophisticated fleet of news vans and live microwave transmissions, television news compresses the urban landscape, instantly bringing images from the far reaches of the megalopolis. In the local television newsroom, police and emergency scanners often set the tempo for much of what is covered. As one of the tried and true staples of a TV news program, crime reports provide gripping stories with strong visuals that grab the viewer’s attention. Crime stories also dominate local news because they are cheap and easy to produce. Much as police cars are dispatched to a crime scene, news vans roll out everyday from their studio lots in pursuit of these same stories.

Figure 1.

“You shouldn’t feel that comfortable living anywhere...” Still from Signal to Noise. Courtesy of Mixed Media Projects.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to follow a local television news reporter from a station in Los Angeles as she gathered her story. I was producing a short documentary for “Signal to Noise,” an innovative public television series that took a critical look at our relationship with television. While I was at the station with my crew, the reporter went out to do a story on a couple of home invasion robberies in Lancaster, a distant bedroom community of Los Angeles. Like any other large metropolitan area, crimes occur everyday in Los Angeles. So what made these home invasion robberies in Lancaster stand out from the many other crimes committed that day?

“News is what’s new and different,” so goes this popular truism of journalism. Crime in the inner city is not different. South Central Los Angeles, especially after the much televised 1992 riots, has gained a worldwide reputation as the embodiment of our worst urban nightmares. Crime in the inner city, both in its perception and its reality, has become cliché. Thus its news value decreases. However, crime that violates the traditionally safe confines of the suburbs is news, especially in a suburb known as a refuge for people who have fled crime in the big city. For a typical, middle-class suburbanite (an important target audience for television news programmers), a robbery in the central city could just as well have taken place in another country or on another planet. But in Lancaster? As the reporter said during her report broadcast later that night, “You shouldn’t feel that comfortable living anywhere, even if you do live in Lancaster.”

Local television news creates a landscape of fear. George Gerbner has shown that the more people watch television, the greater their...