Crime and violence have pervasive impacts on the development of America's human capital. The fear, disruption of activities, physical mayhem, and financial losses that they produce clearly reduce the productivity of the workforce, limit the effectiveness of our schools, destroy our families, weaken our neighborhoods, increase disadvantage, and pose the most serious threat to those plagued by poverty and deprivation. The development of a scientific understanding of the causes and consequences of crime and violence, how to prevent them, protect their victims, and justly punish their perpetrators should be a top public priority. Media coverage of crime tends to be sensationalistic and episodic, focusing on crimes that are heavily laden with violence and/or racial elements. The increasingly sensationalistic tendencies of the mass media and continued racial divisions within American society have fueled public debate over the meaning of crime and the appropriate social responses. This study the links between media coverage of crime and attitudes about race and attitudes about violence. The general premise is that race-related considerations play an important role in the public's understanding of crime and that these considerations account for the general shift toward a punitive and retributive orientation. A set of experimental manipulations of TV news stories is designed to examine their impact and focus of public attention. Two classes of explanations are distinguished in these experiments. The first rests on the pattern of news coverage. The second set rests on effect of longstanding racial stereotypes in addition to racial cues provided by the media on public interpretation of the news.
