Tagged: media critic

Conservative critics of The Courier-Journal, I have confirmed all of your suspicions: its editorial pages are quite liberal.

Just a few weeks after my last column on Louisville television news' focus on crime, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism published their annual State of the News Media report. The report confirms the assertions in my column: local stations are adding more hours to their news programming even as viewership declines, and crime stories dominate local TV news. The Pew study included weather and sports stories; when my students collected their data, they omitted those two topics if the stories aired during show blocks exclusively reserved for them. Once you remove weather and sports from Pew’s data, crime is the number one topic.

In my previous column I asked why local TV news spent so much time covering crime stories. One reason could be that Louisville has an unusual amount of crime, but as I showed, that’s not the case. Another reason could be that crime stories are very easy for TV news to cover.

Is Louisville more or less safe than it used to be?

If you watch local television news, you’re more likely to think that Louisville is less safe. This is partially because the local TV outlets—WAVE, WHAS, WLKY, and WDRB—spend an extraordinary amount of time covering crime stories despite the preponderance of other, more newsworthy topics.