I had three kids show up on Halloween this year. I was quite disappointed. I love loading up little, or even not so little, kids with candy. And I stock the good stuff. This year it was peanut M&Ms and Snicker's bars. And I'm not one of those chintzy "only take one" types. No! I say "load yourself up". And needless to say, after doing my best to load the kids that showed up I had lots of candy left. And that meant yours truly was going to be on a seriously unhealthy diet until the leftover candy was all gone.
I live in the big city. And I live in a classic neighborhood made up almost exclusively of single family dwellings. When I was growing up we had some cousins who lived in exactly the same kind of neighborhood in the exact the same city I now live in. And when I was a kid I remember hearing the same stories year after year of how they routinely had fifty kids showing up at their door. I didn't stock enough candy to be generous to fifty kids. But if it was likely or even possible I would have done so. Alas I have never had anywhere near fifty kids in the many decades I have lived where I now do.
When I was a kid I lived in a place that was neither strictly rural nor urban. It was somewhere in between. There was a row of houses separated by distances that are similar to the distances between houses in my current neighborhood. But there was only the one row. On one side was a lake so you couldn't build there. And on the other side was land that was owned by various entities (a railroad and the state highway department) that guaranteed it was never going to be built on. So we were isolated in a way similar to the way rural people can be.
But it was a good place to grow up. Everybody knew everybody else and everybody looked out for everybody else. All the mothers in the neighborhood, and this was when "stay at home moms" were the norm, kept an eye out for where the kids were and what they were up to. And they kept in continuous communication between each other by phone. Moms would say "go out and play". But even though we were out of the sight of our own moms we were in the sight of a mom. So all the moms knew where their kids were at all times.
And a similar sort of thing happened with our cousins who lived in the city. Theoretically, city kids could wander far away and get into trouble. But actually they didn't. Kids stayed pretty close to home. And mothers kept in touch as they kept an eye out for what was going on. And that meant that moms felt safe letting their kids out on Halloween to collect candy from "strangers". From a practical point of view there were no strangers.
When I was a kid there was the story of the razor blade in the apple. Supposedly some bad person gave out apples on Halloween with razor blades in them. The kids cut themselves when they ate the apples and were seriously injured. But we kind of knew it was an urban legend. There were no documented cases of it actually happening. And moms were confident that no one their kid was likely to encounter would do such a thing. So everybody went out and Trick or Treated without worrying about that sort of thing.
Until, that is the local TV news got into the act. For a long time they told people not to worry about that sort of nonsense. Then they started changing their tune. Instead of poo pooing these kinds of stories they started playing them up. Was there a big rise in razor blades or poisoning a la Sleeping Beauty? No! Instead some shopping malls saw an opportunity.
Because paired with the entirely unsubstantiated stories of kids in danger were stories about Halloween parties sponsored by shopping malls. "Come to the [insert name here] Mall and have a safe Halloween Experience". Mall operators saw an opportunity to drive more floor traffic to their malls on an evening that would otherwise be extremely slow. Stores saw an opportunity to get some good publicity by giving out some candy while at the same time moving some merchandise. It was a "win - win - win" for the TV stations, the mall operators, and the stores that rented space from them.
But what was lost was the sense of community that a routine event like kids tramping the neighborhood and collecting loot from neighbors can produce. Everybody in the neighborhood got a chance to meet and interact with everybody else in the neighborhood. And people like me, who think kids are a good idea, but also think they are not good with kids, we lost an opportunity to interact with kids in a way that both sides got to enjoy.
And this whole "scare people" trend with respect to local TV news is now so well established that it is really no longer a trend. So what's going on here?
Most people think that the "audience" for a TV show is the people who watch the show but that is untrue. TV viewers are a commodity that TV stations deliver to their real audience, advertisers. A TV station with low ratings but lots of ad revenue is a big success. A TV station with a massive viewing audience but no ad revenue is in deep trouble.
TV stations try to attract a big audience. But some audience members are more valuable than others. And the valuable members of the audience are the members that advertisers are willing to pay the big bucks to reach. Popular shows go off the air and unpopular shows stay on the air because the "popular" shows are unpopular with advertisers and the "unpopular" shows are popular with advertisers.
The same thing is true of the local TV news. Back a long time ago news was a loss leader. Stations provided it as a public service because doing a certain amount of public service was important to keeping their license. But then CNN came along. Ted Turner showed everybody that you could make money on news. And that changed everything.
Because it wasn't just cable news. The networks found out that they could make money on the national news. And that's when the national news went from 15 minutes to thirty minutes. And when shows like "60 Minutes" started popping up all over the place. But it turned out there was also big money in local news. 15 minute local news shows turned into 30 minute shows and then 60 minute shows. Now it's common for the local news in the evening to run 90 minutes. But this sort of thing only works if the ratings are good.
So the search was on for how to goose ratings. And there were lots of consultants that for a fee would disclose the magic secret. But it turned out that the secret was actually pretty simple. Fear sells. Local news has morphed into "tune in tonight to find out what you should be afraid of". They mix in a little "here's what to do to keep you and yours safe" to balance things out. But the main message is "fear".
And we see this play out with Halloween. "Tune in tonight to find out who is trying to harm your kids by giving them dangerous Halloween candy". So they started out by highlighting the "dangers" of apples, especially caramel coated apples, and popcorn, and any other treat that good people spent a lot of time, effort, and love making themselves. "Get only prepackaged commercial products" was their message for keeping people safe. Of course, this drove more business to advertisers.
Then they moved on to the "take your kids to the mall" message. Supermarket candy sales went up at Halloween. But that was small change compared to the money that could be made by driving foot traffic to the mall. So it didn't take long for every local news station to move to saturation coverage of why every parent must immediately yank their kids off the street and take them to the mall instead.
Seattle is far from alone in having a needle problem. People inject drugs and leave the needles laying around in public places. If you aren't careful you can get stuck with one. And if you do there is a small possibility you can get very sick. Most of the discarded needles are found in only a few places. So the "needle problem" is a vanishingly small threat to kids Trick or Treating. But that doesn't stop the local TV stations from going all "Action News" and hysterically shouting at parents to "watch out". And by "watch out" they mean "take your kids to the mall".
Are kids less likely to get stuck by a dirty needle at the mall than in the neighborhood? Actually, no. Most neighborhoods are safer than most malls when it comes to the likelihood of encountering a discarded needle. But that story would get in the way of TV stations driving more business toward their advertisers.
And fear works when it comes to goosing the ratings of local TV news shows. There is an old saw that goes "if it bleeds, it leads". Crime and disaster are good for the ratings of news shows. But what do you do if you don't have enough crime and disaster to fill today's broadcast? The most common approach is "amplify, amplify, amplify". Focus on something that is actually small. But then blow it up to make it appear large. I stopped watching the local news a long time ago. But I am occasionally visiting someone and they have the local news on while I am there. So here are two stories from the local news that I personally observed.
Several years ago a young woman was murdered. It happened in a small stretch of woods that was between a popular bus stop and a local community college. You walked through the woods to get from the bus to campus and one day some guy jumped out of the woods and killed this young woman. That's a tragedy. But the guy was captured immediately and there have been no problems there before or since.
So it's actually quite a safe place. But that didn't stop local news people from jamming a microphone into the face of every woman they could find and asking "aren't you afraid" or, even better, "how afraid are you?". Anyone who hadn't been afraid before the story aired sure would be after watching this play out on their home TV. But it's not just the reporters in front of the camera.
Another time it was late in the evening and the 11 PM news was on. The fourth story of the night involved a fire. No one was hurt and damage was relatively modest. But the news people had tons of video of emergency vehicles parked with their lights flashing dramatically. So since great (as in eye catching and dramatic) video was available, the story had to be run even though it had little or no news value. The people behind the scenes deciding what stories to go with are equally complicit. But wait! There's more.
You can get a lot of mileage out of "amplify, amplify, amplify" but what do you do if even that doesn't work? What if there are no juicy stories to be found locally at all.? The answer is you import juicy stories from somewhere else. It is now cheap and easy to get video from far away places, even on a local news budget. So if you are short on local material import a story from somewhere else and don't make it obvious it's not local.
I've seen this happen on local TV news shows, but as I said, I don't routinely watch them so I don't remember a specific example of this. But I do read the daily newspaper every day. And I have seen them do it. These stories don't show up on the front page unless they are a big story. But the paper runs "crime blotter" segments where murders and particularly grisly car crashes and the like are reported. I will occasionally see a story that looks like the rest. But its byline is from a remote part of the state. Or it is even from another state entirely.
People think crime and violence are out of control and getting worse. The opposite is actually true. But if you watch the local news but not closely and carefully you can be forgiven for getting this completely wrong. Most of every broadcast is dedicated to crime and violence. If you look at how many crimes show up on the typical local news broadcast it's about the same number as it was thirty years ago. Local news operations have gotten better at finding crime and violence. They have especially gotten better at sensationalizing it.
And this has been great for ratings. But it is the opposite of news. News is supposed to tell us what of importance is going on. Instead they deeply mislead us into believing that something (crime) is up when it is actually down. They make the unimportant sound important and short change or completely ignore what is actually important. And they tell us they are making us safe by herding us into malls on Halloween when we would actually feel safer and be safer if we stayed in our neighborhoods and celebrated Halloween with our neighbors.
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