November 15, 2024
This event was recorded and the recordings will be posted here in the near future.
In the U.S., media coverage of crime, violence, the criminal legal system, and criminal system reform faces perennial issues with racial bias, fear-mongering, elite voices setting the agenda and drowning out impacted communities, and anecdotal incidents obscuring broader data trends. These patterns demand an inquisition into narrative shift, agency, and voice. Who decides what counts as news? Whose stories get told, who are the storytellers, and who chooses when to elevate those stories? In the status quo, marginalized communities are frequently reduced to negative statistics, demeaning or one-dimensional characterizations, or exploitative portraits of pain. This media landscape, in turn, elevates and entrenches discourse and public policy that reinforces existing social hierarchies and rarely surfaces the root causes of what makes or keeps communities safe.
This one-day convening explored media coverage of crime and of criminal legal reform—the dual dangers of lies and disinformation as well as strong truths weakly told or weakly understood. We examined different paths forward where communities are explored in their full complexity and able to shape their own public narrative about accountability in the face of harm—individual, institutional, and systemic. This conference explored the barriers to, and paths toward, achieving a vision where media do not reproduce common myths of public safety and do not rely on dehumanizing depictions to legitimate public policies of inequity. We also addressed how communities can hold media accountable when negative portrayals continue and can build their own media infrastructure to tell their own stories.
AGENDA
8:30am - 9:00am — Check In, Coffee available
9:00am - 9:15am — Welcome & Framing
9:15am – 10:15am — Panel 1: Is Crime News?
Moderator: (Boston Globe)
Speakers: (Michigan State University), (Newmark Graduate School of Journalism CUNY ), (Clark University)
The “crime beat” is a common assignment for early-career journalists. Different communities experience differential coverage, with poor and marginalized communities of color—Black people, Muslims, immigrants—frequently demonized and othered. Crime reporting often treats crime as entertainment rather than diving deeper to illuminate inequality in society and to illuminate the root causes of community violence and instability. This kind of reporting typically focuses on criminal accusations – first appearances, mugshots, arraignments – or high-profile trials, lifting up salacious cases and creating media spectacle from anomalous situations that may not reflect patterns of harm or how the system typically treats people pushed through it after the cameras disappear. Further, this “crime beat” reporting often treats law enforcement as partners in the production of media narratives. This often-uncritical reception of government sources, sometimes even printing police press releases verbatim, rarely happens in other journalistic domains. But this process of news production shapes what types of crimes get reported, how frequently they get reported, the ways criminal reform gets reported, and the impact that has on the broader public in shaping visions of communities, race, and safety. This panel will explore how reporting can, alternately, distort or unearth what happens in our system of criminal punishment, how communities experience crime reporting, and bigger questions about how media create or entrench narratives about who deserves protection and what produces safety.
10:20am – 11:20am — Panel 2: Elite Media Capture: How Position and Power Shape Race and Crime Narratives
Moderator: Sandra Susan Smith (Harvard Kennedy School)
Speakers: (University of Chicago), (Civil Rights Corps), (Independent Journalist), (CUNY School of Law)
This panel will explore who gets treated as valid sources of knowledge when it comes to coverage of crime, harm, the criminal legal system, and social movements for reform. Poor communities of color have always been poorly covered—and in part that is a reflection of access to media. But it also reflects connections between academics, policing, and media. There is widespread institutional pressure for police preservation within the academy, endowing a normative picture of police as positive agents of social good who should be insulated from critique. And this leads not only to sources for reporters coming primarily from institutions of law enforcement or academics sympathetic to law enforcement but, when communities are able to break through, to strong truths weakly told, fighting upstream against a longstanding narrative. The consolidation of the media landscape and the 24-hour (cable) news cycle only compound these dynamics. But the reality on the ground, particularly in communities saturated with police, is much more complicated.
11:20am - 11:40am — Break
11:45am - 12:45pm — Panel 3: Reform and Retrenchment: Media, Fear, and Policy Rollbacks that Impede Safety
Moderator: (Brennan Center for Justice)
Speakers: (The Sentencing Project), (NYU Journalism, Empire City podcast), (Slate)
Too often, fear-based narratives obscure or ignore evidence, grow out of racism and feed racial stereotypes, and shift public opinion through distortion or obfuscation. Reforms that are supported by research are lambasted; for example, despite continuing efforts by  and researchers establishing an that there is no link between bail reform and increased crime, that narrative continues to dominate airwaves and column inches, particularly around critical elections. But even when the information reported includes evidence-based social science research and the voices of knowledgeable community advocates on the ground, too often we see strong truths weakly told: the prevailing narrative of crime and punishment is robustly told, but other ways of ensuring community safety are lifted up as luxuries amidst necessities. How can journalists partner with communities in pushing back against these dominant narratives and preventing rollbacks and retrenchment?
12:45pm – 1:30pm — LUNCH BREAK
Provided for speakers; on your own for attendees
1:30pm – 2:15pm — KEYNOTE ADDRESS
, Invisible Institute | Pulitzer Prize Winner for You Didn’t See Nothin
2:20pm - 2:45pm — Break
2:45pm - 3:45pm — Panel 4: When media create the story – who gets to be a victim, and who is marked a criminal?
Moderator: Katy Naples-Mitchell (Harvard Kennedy School)
Speakers: (Sacramento State), (Independent Journalist), (University of Chicago)
Those who are victimized in under-resourced communities of color are often rendered invisible. Gwen Ifill coined the term “missing white woman syndrome” to bring attention to the outsized focus white women victims receive from traditional media. At the same time, there is a dearth of reporting about people whose lives are undervalued by media elites: missing Black and Latina and Indigenous women, criminalized survivors, people who experience abuse by law enforcement officials, undocumented immigrants, who are more likely to be victimized or exploited but are painted as perpetrators in national news, young men of color killed by gun violence. This imbalance in coverage often feeds tropes about the validity of victimhood based on race, gender, class, religious background, immigration status, and other social identities and hierarchies. This type of media coverage also fuels a victim-perpetrator binary belied by the lived reality in many under-resourced communities where crime or violence are most prevalent. How can we better show up for these communities? This panel will explore how shifting media coverage can bring much-needed attention to the human dignity of people who are too-often ignored, and how that broader shift can also combat stereotypes about who deserves protection, fueling a more holistic public policy to honor what people who have survived harm need.
3:50pm – 4:50pm — Panel 5: Telling Our Own Stories: Media Accountability and Elevating Ignored Voices
Moderator: Katy Naples-Mitchell (Harvard Kennedy School)
Speakers: (Independent Journalist, Ear Hustle podcast), (former editor of The Bay State Banner), (The Triibe), (MLK50)
In the age of rampant online disinformation, and in increasingly limited media markets, how can communities mobilize to create news coverage that counters widely held, though empirically unsupported, beliefs about violence and harm? Who gets to be a source and who gets to hold the mic—and, further, how can people from marginalized communities tell their own stories? Panelists will explore how the information ecosystem can foster better policy debates on safety and healing shifted toward how and where to invest resources to address the root causes of crime and what actually creates safety. How can news coverage drive us toward public policy that instills meaningful accountability and opportunities for changed behavior for people who have caused harm, and fosters community safety by providing material support to people who have been harmed?
Closing Remarks
Media Mythmaking of Punishment and Safety: Changing the Narrative on Race, Crime, and Reform is sponsored by the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management (Harvard Kennedy School) and the Criminal Justice Institute (Harvard Law School).