Crime Journalism and Radio broadcasting

SIGNIFICANCE: Since the advent of commercial radio broadcasting during the 1920s, Americans have relied upon radio reporting and commentaries for significant portions of the information they receive on crime and criminal justice.

The advent of radio broadcasting during the early twentieth century produced a revolution in American life by bringing into Americans’ homes local, national, and international news, along with such features as live reports from crime scenes and the voices of judges in courtrooms.

The first American radio station began broadcasting in 1920. Within only two years, more than five hundred stations were broadcasting across the United States. Networks that linked different stations through telephone lines, so that all the stations could broadcast the same programs at the same time, began in 1926 with the creation of the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) in 1926. The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) started one year later.

Early in 1927, the Federal Radio Commission, the predecessor of the Federal Communications Commission , set the broadcast band for commercial radio and assigned frequencies to stations. News coverage began with presidential election returns of 1920 but remained only a minor segment of early programming, which was dominated by talk, music, and variety shows. Local stations reported on crimes, but there were relatively few broadcasts or summaries.

In 1925, WGN in Chicago broadcast the first major crime story on radio with intermittent coverage of the so-called Scopes monkey trial in Dayton, Tennessee. Listeners were brought to the scene and allowed to participate vicariously in the trial, which helped make on-the-spot stories irresistible to the public. Soon, radio stations were experimenting with the use of ambient sounds from scenes of news stories as well as contrived sound effects created in studios to convey a sense of immediacy and urgency—a most effective combination in reporting on crimes.

The 1930s saw several major developments in the evolution of broadcast news. In 1930, regularly scheduled news broadcasts began on the networks with celebrity announcers offering commentaries on the news. Occasionally, they included criminal justice stories that they picked up from newspapers and wire services. In 1932, on-the-spot radio reporting was established technically and journalistically when both CBS and NBC connected special lines to reporters in Hopewell, New Jersey, who were reporting on the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby . Both networks kept up vigils for seventy-two days, until the baby’s body was found. The Lindbergh kidnapping trial in 1935 became the first nationally broadcast murder trial when the networks provided daily accounts and commentary on the proceedings.

Radio was ideally suited to breaking news about crimes because of its instantaneous coverage of events that gave listeners a feeling of personal involvement that no other medium could match. During the 1930s the networks began to broadcast realistic radio dramas about crime and detectives that drew large audiences.

The Modern Era of Radio News

The modern era of radio newscasting began in 1938 with coverage of the Munich crisis that helped precipitate World War II and continued through the war. Live broadcasts from the European and Pacific war zones drove the development of radio journalism. Improved news broadcasting was reflected in an increased immediacy in reporting on domestic crime and the criminal justice system. By the war’s end, more than 60 percent of Americans listed radio as their primary source of news.

New technologies developed during the war years brought more advances to radio journalism. For example, lighter-weight radio transmitters allowed journalist to report live from more remote locations, and the development of high-fidelity recording tape made it easier to bring the voices of newsmakers to newscasts. Meanwhile, broadcasters increasingly depended on shorter, on-the-spot reporting of breaking news, coupled with recorded “sound bites” that added the voices of actual newsmakers to the immediate coverage. The networks provided news content “feeds” that allowed affiliate stations to tape and re-use the voices of newsmakers and the stories done by network correspondents.

Despite these advances, news programming slowly was being reduced in stature as commercial television expanded to become the major medium in the postwar years. Television news differed from that of radio in its greater emphasis on stories that lent themselves to visual elements. At that time, news broadcasting accounted for only a small part of commercial- and entertainment-driven radio, and crime subjects accounted for only about 5 percent of typical news broadcasting in the 1950s.

The period from 1946 to 1960 saw the introduction of format radio—broadcasting designed to reach specifically defined segments of the listening population—based on such criteria as age and ethnicity. This development brought new changes to radio journalism. Some stations built broadcasting formats around news, talk, and sports programs that featured heavy concentrations of local, regional, and global news. However, such stations were vastly outnumbered by stations with other formats.

From 1960 to 1980, radio broadcasting expanded from the AM band by adding the FM band, and stations began replacing network-oriented programming with highly localized programming. As radio diversified to serve more fragmented audiences, radio news was redefined. Short newsbreaks, headline news, and rapidly paced stories became the norm for FM stations, but with one major exception: the nonprofit National Public Radio (NPR). Through a network of affiliated stations, NPR brought back high standards of broadcast journalism by specializing in reporting on location and using background noise, sound effects, and music to enrich news stories. NPR also offered deeper coverage and analyses of news—including criminal justice topics—than was available on commercial stations.

After 1980, radio journalism experienced a rebirth, but on a smaller scale than in earlier decades. By the mid-1980s, talk radio programs that offered discussions of issues in the news and often invited listeners to participate gained large audiences. By the mid-1990s talk radio was one of the most popular formats on the air. Talk show hosts saw themselves as playing a significant role in shaping public opinion and as having an impact on politics and public policy. Meanwhile, many broadcasters sought to achieve economies of scale by relying on satellite-delivered national news summaries and reduced their local news staffs. As a result, many stations cut back or even eliminated their local news operations, with a resultant reduction in radio reporting of crime and criminal justice.

Bibliography

Barr, Emily. "The Way We Cover Crime Is Criminal." TV News Check, 19 June 2024, tvnewscheck.com/journalism/article/the-way-we-cover-crime-is-criminal/. Accessed 9 July 2024.

Douglas, Susan J. Listening In: Radio and American Imagination. New York: Crown, 1999. Well-documented look at how radio shaped the American psyche socially, politically, and economically.

Hilliard, Robert L., and Michael C. Keith. The Broadcast Century and Beyond: A Biography of American Broadcasting. 3d ed. Burlington, Mass.: Focal Press, 2001. Popular history of the most influential and innovative industry of the twentieth century.

Larson, Gary W. “Radio Journalism.” In American Journalism: History, Principles, Practices, edited by W. David Sloan and Lisa M. Parcell. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002. Thorough and often fascinating history of radio news from its beginnings up to the twenty-first century.

McBride, Kelly. "Local Newsrooms Want to Stop Sensationalizing Crime, But It's Hard." Poynter Organization, 11 Apr. 2023, www.poynter.org/ethics-trust/2023/journalists-if-it-bleeds-it-leads-accountability-reporting/. Accessed 9 July 2024.

Sacco, Vincent F. “Media Constructions of Crime.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 539 (May 1995): 141-154. Analysis of how the news media facilitate the marginalization of competing views on crime issues.