Making the movies real: The death penalty & local TV news

Crime, Law and Social Change

Volumn 26, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 303-328

  Yanich, Danilo ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 21744451265     PISSN: 09254994     EISSN: 15730751     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/bf00138899     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. In Edward Jay Epstein, News from Nowhere: Television and the News. (New York, Random House, 1973), 4-5.
2. Joseph R. Dominick, Alan Wurtzel and Guy Lometti, "Television Journalism vs. Show Business", Journalism Quarterly, 1975 (52), 213-218.
3. Tony Atwater, "Product Differentiation in Local TV News", Journalism Quarterly, 1984 (64), 757-762.
4. Tony Atwater, "Consonance in Local Television News", Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 1986 (30), 467-472.
5. Doris Graber, Crime News and the Public (Chicago, Praeger, 1980).
6. Center for Media and Public Affairs, Media Monitor, January/February 1996 (X), 1.
7. William C. Bailey, "Murder, Capital Punishment, and Television: Execution Publicity and Homicide Rates," American Sociological Review October 1990 (55), 628-633.
8. Wendy Lesser, Pictures at an Execution (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1993), 25.
9. Wendy Lesser, Pictures at an Execution, 25.
10. The videotape of the execution of Robert Alton Harris was made with Harris' permission. The videotape was ordered by a Federal judge in San Francisco on the request of the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU was seeking evidence for its suit contending that the use of the gas chamber violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. It was the only videotape ever produced of an American execution. At the judge's direction, however, the videotape was destroyed in January 1994 by the clerk of the court after lawyers for the state agreed not to introduce new testimony from witnesses to executions in gas chambers. See, The News Media & the Law 34 (spring 1994).
11. John D. Bessler, "Televised Executions and the Constitution: Recognizing a First Amendment Right of Access to State Executions", Federal Communications Law Journal, 1993 (45), 355-435.
12. Implicit in Bessler's call for television being given "specific" access to the execution as a means of communicating the nature of executions is a faith in the seeming neutrality of the camera. That very issue was raised by both the plaintiff and the defense in the KQED v. Vasquez case and it was clear from the testimony that the notion of the camera acting as a "neutral witness" was much easier to advance in the abstract than in concrete terms. For a discussion of this issue, see Lesser, Pictures at an Execution, 156-198.
13. Wendy Lesser, Pictures at an Execution, 5.
14. Wendy Lesser, Pictures at an Execution, 23.
15. Wendy Lesser, Pictures at an Execution, 258.
16. At the time of the broadcasts that were included in this analysis, TCI owned Channel 2. On February 13, 1996, TCI Cablevision sold its cable company to Suburban Cable.
17. Capital Communications was sold to the Disney Company in 1995.
18. In September 1995, Channel 3 (KYW) and Channel 10 (WCAU) switched network affiliation. KYW became a CBS affiliate and WCAU went to the NBC network.