The maxim “If it bleeds, it leads” has long been a part of journalism. Many of the Google search returns for If it bleeds, it leads want to put that as something unique to television news broadcasts, but it long predates television news, and has frequently been used by newspapers as well.
We have often noted that The Philadelphia Inquirer, the nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, doesn’t like to tell its readers the unvarnished truth, likes to censor what its readers see. The Inquirer only rarely reports on homicides in the City of Brotherly Love. I’ve told the truth previously: unless the murder victim is someone already of note, or a cute little white girl, the editors of the Inquirer don’t care, because, to be bluntly honest about it, the murder of a young black man in Philadelphia is not news. The paper paid more attention to the accidental killing of Jason Kutt, a white teenager shot at Nockamixon State Park, an hour outside of the city. That’s four separate stories; how many do the mostly black victims get?
And now, the Inquirer, with so few readers that circulation is paid for by a whopping 1.67% of what ought to be its metropolitan service area,
A 35-year-old won’t let Tyrone Williams forget the day Action and Eyewitness News trucks rolled down his block.
“I remember July 27, 1987, a Saturday, like it was yesterday,” Williams said, “because, at this time, I’m scarred for life from this stabbing.”
Williams was 20 years old when a group of white men and teenagers attacked him and his family outside their Olney home. One of the attackers, he remembered, used the N-word before jumping his brother Barry and attempting to stab their mother. Williams was trying to protect her when a knife went into his torso, puncturing his lung.
“I could’ve died,” Williams, now 55, recalled.
His attackers targeted the family in a case of racist mistaken identity after they’d exchanged words with a different group of African American men and boys near the now-shuttered Fern Rock Theater, Williams said.
There’s been trouble like this many times before. It’s just that no one bothered to report it. That was how Eyewitness News reporter Joyce Evans summed up coverage of the white-on-Black beating that put Williams in the hospital. When Action News’ Vernon Odom covered the same crime that evening, surviving footage described the area, then predominantly white, as “one of the town’s most racially explosive neighborhoods.”
There’s a lot more at the original, but this is the introduction to the story’s documenting that KYW-TV, Channel 3, the CBS local owned-and operated station, originated Eyewitness News in 1965, and WPVI-TV, Channel 6, the ABC local owned-and-operated station, began Action News in 1970.
The institution of local broadcast news is a young one, but among the most ubiquitous in the United States. It’s a pair of routines that unfold each night: As Americans gather to wind down their days, the medium has worked to deepen racial tensions and reinforce racial stereotypes about communities of color.
This format launched in Philadelphia, first with the birth of Eyewitness News in 1965, and then with Action News in 1970. Over the next few generations, the pervasive and seductive twin broadcasts would spread to stations across the country — and with them, negative narratives about neighborhoods that would effectively “other” certain groups based largely on race, class, and zip code.
More than half a century later, the impact of this efficient and pioneering approach remains, but continues to be condemned as harmful, as critics call for a reimagining of stories that tell a fuller story of communities, one that more accurately captures the humanity and dignity of all who live there.
To what does the Inquirer object? It seems that local television stations do radical things like send cameras and reporters to local breaking news stories and, Heaven forfend! take pictures and video at the scene.
There “when something blew up” could have been a tagline for the nightly programs that have defined local television news since 1965, when an up-and-coming Philadelphia news director named Al Primo rolled out the nation’s first episode of Eyewitness News.
The new breed of local news would transform how Americans received the day’s headlines. It would even change the substance of the news itself. Before Eyewitness appeared on America’s small screens, local television news hardly existed, with national stories dominating the day’s headlines as anchors vied for spots at big-city network markets. And it was delivered largely behind a desk, by a suited white man in a series of passive sentences.
Primo repackaged the day’s events as infotainment — a fast-paced series of vignettes delivered by a “news family,” complete with a male-female pair of attractive, bantering anchors and intrepid reporters interviewing sources on the scene.
The station quickly climbed the ratings charts and inspired imitators nationwide. Soon, the networks were drawn to a new approach that hooked viewers with a mix of sensational headlines and emotional human interest stories.
Must’ve been what the audience wanted: the Inquirer itself reported that WPVI drew 287,000 viewers for it’s 6:00 PM local newscast, in February of 2018, and 163,000 for the 11:00 PM news show, while the newspaper had a circulation of 101,818 daily copies in May of 2019. WPVI, which has higher ratings than the other Philadelphia stations, is still only one of four.
Of course, local television news is free — although most people are paying for cable subscriptions — while newspapers cost money, but it would seem that a lot more people watch the local news than read the Inquirer. There is something to be said for providing your customers what they want.
As local TV news ratings rose and ad earnings rolled in through the end of the 20th century, Philadelphia lost hundreds of thousands of white residents to the suburban locales seen in newcast commercials for four-door sedans, Ethan Allen bedroom sets, and real estate brokerages. Images of white families in tidy subdivisions and spacious homes broke up dispatches that more often than not cast the city and its Black residents in a negative light.
LOL! “(C)ommercials for four-door sedans, Ethan Allen bedroom sets, and real estate brokerages”? Kind of dripping with condescension there! Perhaps the author doesn’t believe that black Philadelphians might want Ethan Allen bedroom sets?
Network executives had figured out how to extract news that entertained and attracted viewers with a familiar story line: An endless loop with scenes of dangerous urban streets.
Most of the time, those cameramen were documenting crime in certain neighborhoods where poverty and decades of failed social policies had given way to higher rates of crime and population loss.
Note that the author was blaming “higher rates of crime and population loss” on “poverty and decades of failed social policies,” rather than the people, the criminals, committing the crimes! The not-so-subtle message: it’s not really their fault that they are out there shooting people.
Oddly enough, even though I grew up poor, I still knew that shooting people was wrong, and, amazingly enough, even though I owned a rifle and a shotgun as a teenager, I never shot anyone.
And here we come to the crux of the newspaper’s complaint, at least the crux other than Philadelphians paying more attention to television news than the paper:
Longtime Action News reporter Mike Strug, who joined the station in 1966 and went onto spend four decades in local television news, recalled reporting shifts spent sitting in a police vehicle at the corner of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, waiting for a crime to occur. The working-class, multiracial neighborhood has struggled with drugs, addiction, violence, and poverty for decades.
The format didn’t often encourage reporters to return to the scene of the crime, follow up on root causes or the lives affected, or document the good in complex neighborhoods like Kensington— where, just like everywhere else, people live, work, and play.
If Mr Strug spent nights sitting in a police car at Kensington and Allegheny, waiting for a crime to occur, doesn’t that say that a lot of crime occurs in that area? The Philadelphia Badlands are notorious enough to have a separate Wikipedia entry, and the Inquirer itself reported, on August 17, 2020, on the open air drug market there:
In Philadelphia’s Kensington district, home to one of the largest open-air drug markets in the United States, crowds of sellers and buyers flock to corners as if there never were a pandemic.
“The blocks [where drug dealing takes place] never closed,” said Christine Russo, 38, who’s been using heroin for seven years. She waited Friday near Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, at the heart of the city’s opioid market, while a friend prepared to inject a dose of heroin. “Business reigns. The sun shines.”
The newspaper even included a photo of what appears, from the back, to be a man injecting drugs right out on Kensington Avenue, in front of SEPTA’s Allegheny Station.
Here’s where the Inquirer’s introspection fails: if television news doesn’t do much in the way of follow-up on crime stories, is that not a niche that the newspaper itself should fill? What we’ve actually seen is the paper trying to make martyrs out of 12-year-old Thomas J Siderio, Jr, who opened fire on the police, including trying to get the officer who shot and killed the punk himself killed, by investigating and publishing his name after Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw refused to disclose it for the officer’s safety, and 13-year-old Marcus Stokes, whom the paper falsely said “was fatally shot in North Philadelphia on his way to school“, when, in actuality, he was sitting in a parked, and possibly disabled, car, eleven blocks from his school, a quarter of an hour after he was supposed to be in school.
What we should see are stories in the newspaper about those shot and killed, where they lived, what their families were like, and how they lived their lives, but those types of stories seem limited to white victims like Jason Kutt and Samuel Collington. As of 2:19 PM EDT on Tuesday, March 29th, the paper has no such story on 15-year-old Sean Toomey, another supposedly innocent victim, gunned down in what was probably a wayward shot from another crime.
Of course, if the Inquirer actually reported in depth on the victims in Killadelphia’s combat zones, it would find that most of the victims were bad guys themselves, gang-bangers or wannabes, and, to be brutally honest, mostly black. That is something that Executive Editor Gabriel Escobar and Published Elizabeth “Lisa” Hughes absolutely do not want to publicize.
As of Monday, March 28th, there have been 495 people reported as having been shot in the City of Brotherly Love, 373 of the victims being black (of which 55 were reported as being Hispanic), 116 white (of which 18 were reported as being Hispanic), 4 (including one listed as Hispanic) Asian, and 2 listed as being of unknown race.
It’s difficult to ignore those numbers: in a city that’s only 38.27% non-Hispanic black, 64.24% of all shooting victims are non-Hispanic black. Black Philadelphians including those who are Hispanic constitute 75.35% of all shooting victims.
The Inquirer laments that local television news is actually covering the news, but doesn’t cover the news in depth. Yet the paper itself not only ignores many of the stories superficially, but declines to cover the crime stories in depth, because those stories just don’t fit Teh Narrative.
