Reporting crime
- 28 Jan 08, 09:16 AM
Last week, the director general Mark Thompson gave a speech, which was also published on this blog, in which he had some thoughts about the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½'s responsibilities towards reporting crime.
"A child murder under any circumstances is a unique and terrible tragedy," he said. "But we shouldn’t allow our coverage of one or even an unconnected series of individual events to give the public impression that these things are an everyday occurrence or that the trend is up when in fact it is down."
He did say that he thought the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ was "less guilty of this kind of exaggeration than almost any other part of the British media" but added that being less guilty didn't mean we were always entirely innocent.
We've been giving his words some thought this week. On Thursday the showed there had been a 9% drop in overall crime in England and Wales, though there had been a 4% rise in gun crime. What should our response to that have been? The story was reported online, and early in the day on other parts of ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ News, but as the Peter Hain resignation and the SocGen story came along it fell down the running orders. Had the crime figures revealed a 9% rise in crime, would we have allowed it to drop down the agenda so much?
It's clear to me that commercial media has an interest in reporting increasing crime because it knows that it sells. There's no particular obligation on them - or commercial interest - in reporting falling crime. It's not the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½'s job to play down crime, but it is our duty to report it accurately and where appropriate to act as a corrective to the rest of the media. Often that will mean giving context, as well as reporting specific incidents.
I've written on this blog before about why I think the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ coverage of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann was responsible.
Crime that is unusual and extreme will always have news value for audiences. The ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ is correct to report such crime as part of its broad news service. But we should always make efforts to explain how typical, or otherwise, such crime is. And we should report it in calm terms. We should not be scaring our audiences unnecessarily nor should we ignore and underplay crime that harms many members of our audience.
Peter Horrocks is head of ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Newsroom
