All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Each week we invite someone from outside PE to weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large. This week, we turned to Alan Mutter, author of the blog Reflections Of A Newsosaur and former newspaper columnist and editor. He's currently a managing partner at Tapit Partners. Below, Alan discusses some of the shortcomings of local television news, a subject we've touched upon only briefly. As always, the opinions expressed and factual assertions made in “Outside Voices” are those of the author, not ours, and we seek a wide variety of voices. Here's Alan:


If you’ve been feeling edgy lately, one contributing factor may be the heavy dose of meaningless mayhem you watch on the typical local television newscast.

Statistically speaking, I found in a quick bit of number crunching, you are about 50 times more likely to view a local TV news story about a murder than one about science, child care or pollution. You are roughly 20 times more likely to “eyewitness” a fire than a report on education, discrimination or marriage.

Confirming the not-so-subliminally scary tone of many local newscasts, I found that stories about murders, fires and rapes actually dominated more than two-thirds of the coverage I sampled. The distressing results are depicted in the graphic below.

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