Since moving to Montana, something curious has happened: I've become a local crime junkie. Or, let me put it this way: I'm keenly aware, in a way that I never was in New York or Walla Walla or Austin or Seattle, that I'm surrounded by crime, and violence, and accidents. I know about the guy who killed a woman on the side of the road a few hours away, got pulled over a mile from my house, and shot himself. I know about the two people who entered a woman's house near the river and stabbed her repeatedly. I know about the police officer in Bozeman who killed himself and his wife last week. I know about the 20-something guy out riding his bike who got rammed by a car, and the little girl who died after her mom fell asleep while driving her car in the middle of the afternoon, and the woman who was attacked by two pit bulls and died from her injuries. And that's just the events that I can remember off the top of my head after a month of living here. Some happened in Missoula, some happened elsewhere in the state, but they all blend together into a miasma of crime and badness. I know all of these events not because people have told me in passing, or because I knew anyone involved. I know because, for the first time since I was in high school, I have been reading the local papers. I have subscriptions, and I read our local paper, The Missoulian, most thoroughly, but it's also following "Mountain West Twitter," which I've put in its own list on Tweetdeck and overflows with fire news, conservation news, car crash news, and violent crime news. I follow the Montana state newspapers on Facebook as well, and the stock photos of sirens and handcuffs have become regular fixtures in my feed.
This heightened awareness — and the subsequent idea that I'm surrounded by crime — reminds me of a landmark sociological study, released in 1976, that studied the rate people watched/were exposed to violence on television and their view of crime/crime rates around them. In short, the more you watched television (which, in those days, was mostly limited to the three major networks and PBS), the more likely you were to overestimate the amount of crime in your area, to be more afraid to go out by yourself at night, to believe in what's become known as "the mean world" outside. Part of this affect was likely due to the sheer amount of "procedurals" (in which police/investigators/detectives become aware of and solve a crime) that have dominated television for decades. Procedurals present murder and violent crime as an every day/every week phenomenon — and often a "random," uncontrollable one (even though the vast majority of crimes are committed against people who are previously known to the victim). But it's also due to the local and national news, soap operas, "true crime" docudrama, etc. etc.
This study, which has since become incredibly influential (and contested/complicated in various ways), suggested a process far more nuanced than the "hypodermic needle" understanding of how exposure to violence works, e.g. see violence, do violence. It's not that people duplicate what they see on television. It's that the understanding of the world we see on television has an effect on how we understand our own world.
That sounds obvious! But you've certainly had someone tell you that he or she is wholly uninfluenced by commercials, and television, and the media that surrounds them. That's akin to saying that you were wholly uninfluenced by the home you grew up in.
That 1976 study focused on television, but it obviously extends to the internet as well. And yet, I didn't feel this way in New York, where I consumed just as much internet — but of a different kind. In New York, I was surrounded by murders and rapes and car accidents and despicable acts. The crime statistics for my neighborhood in Brooklyn are slightly lower than those in Missoula, even though about the same amount of people live in each. But that has far more to do with the homogeneity of my particular neighborhood — a middle-class Italian enclave slowly gentrifying with upper-middle-class professionals — than the actual crime happening just miles away.
But I very rarely heard about that crime, or the crime that very much did exist in my neighborhood and just across the BQE in Red Hook. I read my "local paper," the New York Times, every day, but if stories of Brooklyn crime were reported, they didn't make their way to the app. I read our local neighborhood blog, "Excuse Me For Asking," but its content was mostly "I can't believe they're putting in another nail salon" or "no one's going to pay that much for a sandwich," never crime-related. I would periodically check in on Brooklyn/neighborhood-based papers like The Brooklyn Eagle and DNAInfo, but they were too broadly Brooklyn. (If you've never lived in Brooklyn, it has roughly a billion neighborhoods). I read the cover of the New York Post, but even when it did focus on crime, it was almost always white-collar.
So does New York not *care* about crime? Does Montana, like other semi-rural and rural areas, care more about crime? There's a lot going on in how a publication chooses to cover/not cover things, and race and class are certainly part of it — a white woman murdered on the Upper East Side, for example, would get covered in depth, whereas black men murdered in Brownsville, Brooklyn rarely are.
But the amount of crime/accident coverage is also a symptom of budget cuts. Reporting on crimes can involve original reporting, but the majority of stories that are flashing past me on my feed require none — just someone to transfer the details from the police department into a post, slap on a stock photo or mug shot, and post it to social media. Some require attending a press conference, but here in Montana, where three of the major newspapers are owned by the same company (Lee Enterprises), it's easy to rely on one reporter to attend that conference, then crosspost across papers.
With reporting budgets falling, accidents and crime reports are easy content....but they're also highly clickable content. I myself have clicked through dozens of time out of curiosity — Was this near me? How did this wreck happen? Who died? — even though previous click-throughs have yielded extremely little information. Even though large swaths of the internet have abandoned click-through advertising rates in favor of native content, small newspapers still sell advertising that way. Traffic accidents clicks might not be "quality" clicks, and might only lead the reader to spend less than a minute on the site, but they're clicks nonetheless.
These stories also encourage engagement with the FB post (for tragedy: lots of people expressing prayers and love; for crimes: people discussing whether crime has or has not gotten better, whether drugs are the root of all evil, whether the perpetrator should rot in hell, etc.) And the most engagement with a FB post, the more *other* posts from that newspaper's feed will surface for the user. Put differently, crime and accident stories introduce readers to non-crime and accident stories that likely would not have otherwise shown up in their feed. Or so the theory goes. They might, of course, still not read those posts.
Crime and accidents are events in the community. They are news. There are benefits to reporting them — Montana has the third-highest fatal car crashes per capita, for example, and reporting who dies and why (alcohol, no seatbelts, speeding) brings awareness, even if it fails to change laws or foster alternatives to drunk or tired driving. But instant crime stories — especially straight facts/no reporting stories — frame crime as something that happens to people, a generalized, ever-present menace. They do not contextualize how individuals become criminals. They do not compare crime rates to national and historical averages.
But they did make it easier to believe Trump when, during the Republican National Convention, he said his administration would "liberate our citizens from the crime and terrorism and lawlessness that threatens their communities" while claiming that Obama "made America a more dangerous environment than frankly I have ever seen, and anybody in this room, has ever watched or seen." It doesn't matter that violent crime is down 26% of the last ten years. It doesn't matter if voters themselves have not witnessed a violent crime, known someone who's been a victim of a violent crime, or even lived in a zip code where a violent crime has been committed in the past year. If you have come to believe in the "mean world," then it makes sense that you would vote for someone who also believes in that mean world — and pledges to fix it.
"The mean world" of suburban and white rural America is an exaggeration. But that doesn't mean that there aren't mean worlds out there: Trump's favorite mean world is Chicago, and other urban areas like Brownsville, in Brooklyn, or parts of Detroit, or mid-size cities like Birmingham, Alabama, now the third-most violent city in America. People who read a lot of internet news might feel like they're in danger; people living in these areas actually live and experience daily danger. But just as Trump isn't concerned about facts, he's not concerned about that experience. The fear is necessary; it, along with the refusal to believe that the world has and will continue to change, is his power source. Eliminate it, and there'd be no need for him.
I'm suggesting that the local papers are pro-Trump, or that they don't also do a significant amount of valuable reporting. It's easy to attribute Trump's win to Fox News and racist grandpas. It's harder to think deeply about the intertwining forces that may have contributed to it — and watch for, even admit to, your own participation in them. These days, I'm still far more scared of running into a deer than actual violent crime in my town. I lock my door intermittently. I'm not scared to run by myself in the early morning. But again: I've only been here a month. Which is all to say: the media we consume matters. But it doesn't always matter in the way we think it does.
Things I Read and Loved This Week:
- The Secret Life of the City Banana!!!
- More poems by 100-year-olds, please
- Excellent piece on blackface in Reaction GIFs
- Patti Smith on the beloved Sam Shephard
- The infuriating myth of reverse racism
- Academish-but-good piece on the feminist history of online security questions
From the AHP Archive:
- How a Remove Idaho School Defends Itself
If you know someone who'd like this mishmash of weekly musings in their inbox, send it their way, subscribe them, cajole them into reading, promise them I sometimes write about Montana and sometimes write about celebrity but always try to write about something different. Also: DC-area! I'll be at Politics & Prose on Monday, August 14th — I'd so love to see you.