Patterns of Deviance in Crime News 49 Patterns of Deviance in Crime News by David Pritchard and Karen D. Hughes Existing research has failed to develop a satisfactory theoretical explanation for journalists’ decisions about which crimes to highlight and which to ignore. We proposed that four forms of deviance (normative deviance, statistical deviance, status devi- ance, and cultural deviance) account for much of the variation in decisions about crime news. To test deviance-based explanations for crime news, we conducted a comprehensive investigation of Milwaukee, WI, homicides and how two newspapers covered them. We used content analysis and interviews with journalists. The results showed that the newsworthiness of a homicide is enhanced when Whites are suspects or victims, males are suspects, and victims are females, children, or senior citizens. We concluded that status deviance and cultural deviance are important components of newsworthiness and that statistical deviance (unusualness) may be much less important than commonly assumed. Routine crime news is easy to overlook because it is so familiar and mundane. Nonetheless, understanding the forces that shape crime news is important because the social and political impact of such news is quite broad. The media’s emphasis on crime, for example, helps to maintain the salience of crime as a political issue (Surette, 1992). It also causes some people to be unduly fearful of victimization (Jacob, 1984; Liska & Baccaglini, 1990). Both these phenomena are independent of actual changes in the crime rate (Jacob, 1984; Lewis, 1993; Scheingold, 1991), and both tend to increase citizens’ receptivity to repressive, tough-on-crime policy proposals (Leps, 1992; Scheingold, 1991). In addition, the amount of newsworthiness journalists assign to individual crimes (i.e., how prominently their news organizations feature the crimes) channels police and prosecutorial resources toward cases highlighted by the media (Pritchard, 1986; Pritchard, Dilts, & Berkowitz, 1987; Scheingold, 1991), and helps audience members “to mark the outer edges of their group and to reinforce their shared cultural identity” (Tucher, 1994, p. 148). David Pritchard (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1984) is chair of the Department of Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research interests include journalism ethics and the interaction between the news media and the legal system. Karen D. Hughes (MA, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1996) is a lecturer in the same department. The authors thank Karen Riggs, Kathy Rogers, and anonymous referees for insightful comments and suggestions, and Tom Luljak for careful work with the study’s interviews. Copyright © 1997 Journal of Communication 47(3). Summer. 0021-9916/97/$5.00