Crime and the media: myths and reality.

• Author: Livingston, Jay
• Position: The United States of Violence: A Special Section - Cover Story

ONE OF THE MOST successful films of recent years was "The Silence of the Lambs." It brought in healthy box office receipts and picked up most of the major Academy Awards. Like many other movies, it was about killing. The story pitted a novitiate FBI agent against two homicidal maniacs - one known, for the most part unseen, and largely unremembered; the other, the character everyone was talking about, Hannibal Lecter.

The movie epitomizes some themes that recur in the media's presentation of crime: that crime is mostly murder; killers are motivated by twisted psychopathic fantasies; criminals are fiendishly clever and methodical; and crimes are solved by even more clever and methodical law enforcement officers, often using computers and other high-tech methods that lay people only dimly understand. There are, of course, variations. Murderers also may be motivated by insatiable greed, and the crime-solvers may be civilians.

People know that movies such as "The Silence of the Lambs" or "Basic Instinct" are not factual, like the 11 o'clock news. Yet, in the case of crime, news tries hard to imitate art. More than half the crimes that make it to the TV news are murders, while the far more frequent felonies become newsworthy only under special circumstances (the victim is a celebrity, criminals take hostages, police kill the criminal, etc.). Nor are the murders in the news typical of most murders. Instead, they are those that most resemble a good Hollywood script. Add to this the profusion of made-for-TV movies "based on a true story," and it becomes clear that the distinction between the news and prime time does not much matter, for they convey similar images of crime.

Even "serious" news magazines give a somewhat distorted picture. Every couple of years, for example, Time magazine runs a cover story on crime. The 1993 version bore the title "America the Violent." Inside, the featured piece, "Danger in the Safety Zone," carried the subhead: "As violence spreads into small towns, many Americans barricade themselves." The feature focused on five crimes: a revenge-motivated shooting of a nurse by a 31-year-old woman in a hospital; the murder of basketball star Michael Jordan's father; a random shooting in a Kenosha, Wis., McDonald's; the murder of a woman by her 15-year-old son as they sat in a theater at a Kansas City mall; and the strangling of an 82-year-old woman in Tomball, Tex. (pop. 6,370).

The rest of the article was devoted to psychological explanations of violence and the atmosphere of fear that pervades America the Violent. The message was clear-nobody is safe. Yet, by and large, these are not the types of violent crimes Americans risk.

The U.S. does have more violent crime than other industrialized societies, with a murder rate anywhere from three to 12 times higher. Other countries rarely have serial killers or those who arm themselves and start firing randomly in restaurants and workplaces.

Murder makes up only about 0.27% of all the felonies tabulated in the FBI's Index of Serious Crime, and only about 1.25% of all violent incidents. Still, 24,000 homicides a year is a lot. However, the killings that swell this statistic are...