crime reporting

Crime reporting

There are tremendous public interests in crime stories and no newspaper can afford to ignore them without damage to circulation and credibility. Crime is a part of life and it is newspaper’s duty to inform the readers of what crimes are going on in their city, state or country. However, crime reporting should not aim at satisfying morbid curiosity or sensation mongering. Although crime reporting is usually assigned to one of the junior reporters in a newspaper, it is a highly responsible and specialized job. The reporter should not only have the ability to sift the grain from the chaff, and the truth from lies, he should also have good contacts in the police and other departments of the administration as well as working knowledge of the penal codes and law on libel and other relevant matters.

Besides, he must observe a code of honour. He should be as objective and as humanly as possible so as to avoid resorting to sensationalism or cheap gimmicks to catch the attention of the readers or the viewers. He should not suppress news of public interest. Nor should he seek to settle personal scores with police officers or lawyers or judges. And he must be careful that in the course of his work, he does not unnecessarily invade a citizen’s privacy.

There has been much criticism of press reporting of crime and not all of it is

baseless. Some reporters have been found guilty of unethical standards, thus causing much pain and sorrow to their victims or their families and friends. Crime Reporters try to glorify the activities of criminals or sometimes make heroes of them. This practice should be discouraged as much as a resort to sensationalism.

The crime reporter much never violates standards of decency and good news taste. There are several types of crime news-murders, fires, accidents, robberies, burglaries, fraud, blackmail, kidnapping, rape, etc.

There are a few fundamental precautions which a crime reporter must take

account of:

• The first is that the police and prosecutors rarely will give them information on a silver platter. That means, a tremendous amount of interviewing and research must be done in a very short time so that a coherent story may be written

• There is no guarantee of police accuracy; and therefore police versions of

names, addresses and other facts must be checked

• Police and journalistic terminology are not identical. The legal term for a

slaying is a homicide, but many news organizations loosely and incorrectly

refer to such crimes automatically as murder.