The people who work in the news media generally reflect the concerns and interests of the population they come from. Many news stories come from tips; those tips come from the friends, associates, and contacts of the people who work in our newsrooms. They are largely white, middle-class or upper-middle class, often uneasily protective of their position on the social ladder, and many of them are simply unable to imagine ways of looking at things that are not of their own class or ethnic experience. Yet, increasingly, prison is becoming a matter of race and class…

And presiding over the entire process are news corporations that are increasingly the subsidiaries of entertainment conglomerates.

Entertainment values are inherently non-journalistic. In entertainment, what we read or hear or see becomes important for the feelings with which it leaves us and not for its accuracy or importance. And nothing satisfies more readily than the easily understandable, the simple emotional reaction based on familiarity. In other words, stereotyping — that convenient shorthand by which we falsify experience — substitutes for news judgment. Crime reporting is overwhelmingly stereotype-based. It is our new mythology, and we journalists become unwitting mythologists, telling the stories that people choose to guide their lives by rather than the stories of more representative miscreants.