What is Newsmaking Criminology?

In a 1988 Justice Quarterly article, Gregg Barak proposed that criminologists offer their expertise to the media rather than avoid interviews. His hope was that a more realistic image of crime and the criminal justice system could be presented to counter the media's sensationalist treatment of such issues. Barak [1988:566] has defined "newsmaking criminology" as follows:

...a newsmaking criminology attempts to demystify images of crime and punishment by locating the mass media portrayals of incidents of "serious" crimes in the context of all illegal and harmful activities; strives to affect public attitudes, thoughts, and discourses about crime and justice so as to facilitate a public policy of "crime control" based on structural and historical analyses of institutional development; allows criminologists to come forth with their knowledge and to establish themselves as credible voices in the mass-mediated arena of policy formation; and asks of criminologists that they develop popularly based languages and technically based skills of communication for the purposes of participating the mass-consumed ideology of crime and justice.

Barak argued that in the past criminologists have not considered how to use mass communications for the purposes of informing, interpreting, and altering media images to reflect more realistically the social, political, and economic conditions of crime and social control. By participating directly in the newsmaking process as credible spokespersons, criminologists can work to redefine the parameters of acceptable or favorable themes about crime and justice. For example, Barak [1988:574] suggests that criminologists attempt to counter the media's focus on "street crimes" by "alerting the public to the vast scope of serious harm caused by the illegal acts of respectable business executives who impersonally kill and maim many more Americans than street muggers and assailants." In addition, while academics have changed the way they think about crime--e.g. by adopting Marxist, structuralist, or institutional models--news media personnel, according to Barak [1988:581], remain preoccupied with the "same old themes."

Barak [1988:582] also has suggested direct participation in organizations that seek to influence policy as another way to do "newsmaking criminology." One reason this is important is that the media typically search for "official spokespersons" of various organizations for quotes while compiling stories [Altheide, 1976:22; Fishman, 1980:85]. On the larger scale, concerned criminologists must become directly involved in policy making organizations where their impact likely will be greater than hoping that the right persons read their scholarly publications.

Past Efforts at Newsmaking Criminology

In 1988, I first read Gregg Barak's article. Having previously done only a few media interviews, I found Barak's discussion of trying to "inform" the media about criminology fascinating and decided to make myself available to the media more frequently. A report of my experiences was published as Becoming a Media Criminologist: Is "Newsmaking Criminology" Possible? in a collection edited by Barak. Later, I created a Web version of the document with a number of additional links to relevant resources.

I attempted to increase my contacts with the media by developing a good working relationship with the university's public relations office. There I was welcomed because the university desires positive media attention. I received several types of assistance. The first was to develop a number of press releases that were sent to all the local news media. These typically employed "teasers": quotes attributed to me that expressed opinions or angles the media may not have yet considered--or so we thought--about criminological "news" topics in the immediate area. The second avenue of exposure was through the university's media guide. After I received a copy of the page proofs of the newly revised media guide which listed my name once, I had my name added under a number of topic areas including: pornography, free speech and censorship; prisons, jails, community corrections programs; juvenile justice; and occult crime; all areas in which I have done research or extensive teaching. I also wrote a short description of what I could discuss under each topic and these were incorporated into the guide. In addition to collaborating with the university's media affairs office, I invited reporters assigned to cover the police and court beats to address my classes and as a result established some personal contacts. These efforts produced results: I was interviewed by newspaper and TV news journalists, asked to make appearances on radio and TV talk shows, and had my speeches or statements made at public forums covered by the media. In 1993, I had my name added to the American Sociological Association's media guide which has resulted in additional calls from reporters.

Following up on Barak's [1988:582] suggestion that one participate in organizations that seek to influence policy as another way to do "newsmaking criminology," I was able to join the local boards of both the American Civil Liberties Union and another free speech organization, the Friends of the First Amendment. As a result of these efforts I increased my media contacts from one or two a year to between ten to twenty a year. Most of the interviews for which I was contacted dealt with two broad topics: censorship/pornography and community corrections/prisons.

I won't retell my experiences here, but the conclusions I drew led directly to my decision to switch from doing interviews to creating Web sites:

Is "newsmaking criminology" possible? My experience and that of others leads me to conclude that trying to use the media to bring the findings of criminological research to a larger audience and enlighten the public is a more difficult task than originally envisioned. It requires an understanding of how the media operates, knowledge of how to communicate successfully in a variety of formats and circumstances, and advance preparation.

Criminologists and other social scientists have found that it extremely difficult to communicate the complexities of social scientific research through a media format such as a TV talk show which is principally concerned with attempting to "entertain" an audience. At best it appears that only coverage of major points or the use of short quotes are possible given most contemporary news media formats. If criminologists hope to communicate through the media they must tailor their findings to these various formats.

However, as long as criminologists remain outside of rather than part of the media they will always be subject to the biases of reporters, editors, news bureau chiefs, etc. With little or no control over how your statements are edited the risk of being misunderstood are indeed great. One solution to these problems would be for criminologists to seek permanent ongoing relationships with the press. In particular, criminologists should strive to become consultants with the ability to provide input over story editing, who to interview, or even which stories to cover. However, the expert will first have to convince the news organization that linking up with them will make the station's crime news coverage well rounded and more accurately reflect reality. I believe that only under these conditions will genuine "newsmaking criminology" be possible.

At that time, I did not know that a way to present materials and perspectives to a worldwide audience directly, the Internet, would soon become a mainstream communications institution. With the advent of the World Wide Web, the gatekeeper role of journalists can be sidestepped entirely. On the other hand, the scholarly community can provide materials directly for journalists.

Why Use the Internet for Newsmaking Criminology?

Like every consequence of my decision to become the world's first Web criminologist, I didn't really think it might have newsmaking criminology implications. From the moment the computer staff installed Mosaic (Netscape) on my office PC a little over four years ago, I knew I wanted to create Web pages, but had no idea where it might lead. As I surfed, I quickly recognized that there was no way to find criminal justice resources on the Web. My criminal justice links pages started as an attempt to help my students navigate the Web. But, as emails started coming in from all over the world expressing appreciation for creating and maintaining such a resource, the possibilities started to emerge. A number of offers to work on projects followed. I tried to choose those that would have a newsmaking criminology impact by appealing to a broad spectrum including students, criminal justice professionals, criminal justice policy makers, journalists and other media personnel, and concerned citizens.

While a number of my colleagues remain skeptical about the role the Internet will play in the future of criminal justice and criminal justice education, it is obvious that the Net is the most significant communication tool ever devised, one with world changing potential. Computer networks linked via a giant TCP/IP backbone now allow instant worldwide dissemination, review, discussion, and revision of documents which can include any type of multimedia aids the author wishes to provide. All of this has happened over the past five years as the World Wide Web has grown from an unknown phenomenon to something discussed in half the TV commercials on many primetime shows.

The World Wide Web is a recent addition to the Internet. While email and news groups have been used for a number of years, the Web only became popular in the mid-1990s with the development of browsers such as Mosiac and its follow-up, Netscape. The Web employs an interactive multimedia format to display "pages" of information. Using a Web browser such as Microsoft Explorer or Netscape, one can access formatted text, hypertext, photos and art reproductions, 3D spaces (VRML), sound or music clips, and video. Web pages are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Using hypertext links, Web searchers can access information from computers around the world in seconds. The Web is fully available to subscribers of on-line services such as Prodigy, America On-line, and CompuServe. By 1995, the number of Web pages available for browsing grew from a few hundred thousand to millions (World Wide Web Consortium, 1995). By June 1996, web search engines such as Lycos (1996) listed nearly 50 million Web pages. Today over 200 million pages are registered with some search engines. Cable TV companies like TIME-Warner and Comcast are now testing cable modem connections which will allow Internet users to download Web pages without virtually no wait time for images to load. Animation and live video will be displayed in real time using "streaming" technologies such as VDOLive or Real Video.

Given the potential audiences for Web-based presentation of materials, the Internet may be the perfect medium for the next wave of newsmaking criminology. With dissemination and feedback built into the Internet's structure, eliminating the need for publication and distribution, two issues remain to be solved, (1) visibility and (2) relevance. Visibility on the web is not automatic. While anyone can put up a Web page, most are never visited. If the Web site can't be found its useless. Submitting new pages to search engines, getting listed on key index pages, choosing just the right metatags, and exchanging links with webmasters of similar pages, etc., sometimes can seen like a full time job.

Relevance is a more difficult issue to solve. I have been asked many times how one can judge the relative worth of stuff on the Web, given that there are no gatekeepers. Anyone can post anything they want to communicate. My answer is always the same. Use the very same standards you would use in everyday life to judge Web documents. Who is the author? Are they known or unknown? Does the article use reputable sources to make its points? Does it have a bibliography? Etc. It is also important to recognize the differences between “sensational,” “popular,” “substantive news/general interest,” and “scholarly” publications, so that sources can be used appropriately. As a Web author you must establish your credibility by having materials to back up what you are saying, like any author would be required to do. Given that I was a criminologist that some folks had heard of prior to moving my base of operations to the Web, the credibility issue was less. Nevertheless, unless my web site remains visible, relevant, and ultimately, useful to people, it will have little overall impact.

Present Activities

To date I have set up three major Web components which are being used to further the goals of newsmaking criminology. These include maintaining a major criminal justice web site which presents multiple perspectives on issues, developing a course on Crime and Media with materials available to the public, and teaching graduate students how to use the Internet and related new media tools to present their own research findings in our graduate seminar, New Media in Criminology. In addition, I registered as an expert on topics related to criminal justice on various journalism and media sites, resulting in continuing contacts with news producers, screen writers, etc., who are researching their efforts.

1. The Criminal Justice Links site has been up and running for nearly four years. At first consisting of only a few pages, the links site now includes more than 20 major pages covering all aspects of crime, law, policing, corrections, and criminal justice education. By mid-1996, over 1,000 other Web pages were linking to the main CJ links page through USF. In 1996, moving the site from USF to FSU lost some who were linked to the old pages. I was unable to maintain a permanent pass through from the old USF site, and ended up reregistering all the pages individually with a number of search engines. In 1997, a site devoted to juvenile delinquency and juvenile justice was added as a part of the Juvenile Justice Role Model Project, co-sponsored by FSU and FAMU.

Each page contains links, some with comments or short annotations, to dozens of sites related to major subtopics under the general topic. Another version of the site was developed for Wadsworth Publishing, using the subheaders in the George Cole text to determine where links should be located. Of course, some topics come up more than once and decisions had to be made where to best place links. In 1996, a searchable index program was added to the site at FSU, allowing keyword searches of all pages in the Web site. The next step (OK, Sergey) would be to place all links into a database program, complete with ratings and annotations, and allow users to create HTML pages on the fly from the entire database. Unless I'm researching a new topic, I don't spend a lot of time looking for new sites. Instead, I use push technologies (mostly email) to have information on new sites sent to me. Some time every day is spent on site maintenance and updates.

Once a new site is located it is added to the appropriate section of the proper page. A few are listed twice as they fit into two categories. Pages must contain some useful information to be added. On many topics there are both pro and con pages listed. For example, some consider graffiti an art movement, others consider it an eyesore, while some are interested in the gang-related aspects of the phenomenon. Links to sites put up by hate groups may be found next to those of anti-defamation groups. I have received hate mail for including some of these sites. To date, little effort has been made to rate the usefulness of sites or comment on their "validity" and relevance, services I would like to provide if time or funding permitted.

In addition to ways to find other pages, the site contains direct links to lectures, articles, and workshop presentations I have authored myself. The goal here is to provide information on topics I have researched. These include papers on the history of forfeiture, lectures on crime and media topics, and Q&A pages on how to use the Web for criminological research and distance learning. The latter two categories were created as part of on-line courses, but the materials are not password protected and open for anyone to use. To date I have not posted the extensive materials I have on antipornography crusades in the US and the UK, but do maintain links pages on these topics. I have made several offers to faculty at FSU to assist in posting their research on the Web site, with mixed results. Issues regarding copyright, whether posting constitutes publication, etc. hold some back from submitting material. Faculty are now putting their course syllabi on-line, and some are creating Web lectures and posting other course materials. Current and potential students can now preview courses and instructors.

2. The Crime and Media course was first offered via distance learning in spring 1996 (and will be taught again in spring 1998). This is a course I have taught over the past 10 years, usually jointly listed as a criminology and journalism/mass media offering. The overall purpose of this course is to analyze the images of crime and the criminal justice system that are presented through the major mass media within the United States. In particular, crime movies, television crime dramas, plus television news and newspaper crime coverage are used as major sources of data for uncovering how the media portrays the society's struggle with the crime problem. In addition to studies of media criminality, the course covers how the media portray police, courts and administration of criminal law, and the American correctional system. In each case media images are compared to empirical studies of policing, the adjudication process, and punishments actually delivered. Overall the goal is to compare media driven perspectives of crime and criminal justice to what is known based upon current criminological research. Whether criminal justice policy is currently made based upon media perceptions is discussed. Finally, we discuss the use of newsmaking criminology as a potential tool to overcome media stereotypes and insure that policy decisions better reflect research findings of what works and what doesn't.

As soon as the lectures and discussion topics for this course were posted, I started to receive emails from journalists and criminologists who were following the topics from week to week. One of the results was that three journalists agreed to provide guest lectures for the course and answer email from students. Patrick Casey of Associated Press, Craig Pittman of the St. Petersburg Times, and Peter Sussman, formerly of the San Francisco Chronicle and co-author of Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog contributed significantly to the course. Teaching the course via the Web fostered the establishment of relationships between students and working professionals in a way that would be virtually impossible in a traditionally taught class. Students and instructor contacted other experts found via the Web to answer tough questions. For example, Jonathan Hill, a British legal expert, provided material on how contempt law results in a gag order on court reporting in the UK. Students posted their term papers as Web pages and have received email from readers worldwide.

3. The New Media in Criminology course resulted from the realization that criminal justice students and faculty needed greater familiarity with the Internet and how to use it as a research and instructional tool. To date the course has been taught twice with FSU Criminology teaching assistants being the bulk of the students. The goal is to train a generation of new scholar-teachers who feel comfortable using the technology and can advance use of the Internet by the discipline. Focus is upon both synchronous and asynchronous distance learning technologies. My personal view of distance learning is that it should be thoroughly integrated into the regular curriculum, with distance learning students sharing classes with in-class students via real time video, audio, and VRML world links (avatars) while those in class use Internet tools shared with distance learners in both real and virtual time. Bifurcating in-class and distance learners will result in "inferior" education for both, as technology literacy is the key to job promotion in the 21st Century. The implications of new media technology for criminal justice education are themselves likely to thoroughly revolutionize the discipline.

I am currently revising the course so that it can serve as a resource for all faculty at FSU who want to add distance components to their courses. Each page starts with a basic explanation of the component, moves to how to use it as a distance learning tool, discusses controversial issues (e.g. copyright, plagiarism, privacy, etc.) which have emerged, looks at the latest innovations in the particular technology, reviews appropriate software choices, and finishes with an index of links to other Web resources. For example, the materials on email cover:

1. How Does Email Work?
2. Why Use Email? Are There Guidelines for How it Should Be Used?
3. What Privacy Issues Have Emerged with the Use of Email?
4. Can I Only Send Plain Text Messages?
5. What is the Difference Between a Mailing List and a Listserv?
6. What are Push Technologies?

Student Efforts

All of the courses that I teach require students to post their written assignments on the Web. This includes both class discussions and papers/projects.

1. Class Discussions

On-line discussion has considerable advantages over traditional classroom discussions. Karp and Yoels (1976) first discussed the "banking model" of college classroom interaction. Typically, students enter a class with the presumption that the professor is the source of knowledge, while students are receptacles who will receive wisdom. Because students are only making "withdrawals," they feel that their classmates' comments are irrelevant, and attention tends to wander when classmates ask questions or make comments. Certainly, no one writes down what a student says because it is not important or "testworthy" material. In classroom interaction, if any exists, the professor asks an occasional low-order recall question, and the same small cadre of students always respond. The other students even begin to stare toward the known talkers when questions are asked, as if they are morally obligated to respond. Professors politely refuse to call on any of the other class members for fear of embarrassing them in front of their peers. Also, students remain silent rather than risking the possibility that their ideas will be questioned by the professor. Although the professor may be responding to students' comments by asking for further elaboration or clarification, or by asking an individual to think out the logical consequences of his or her position, students often interpret such reactions as a put-down of their ideas. Finally, students quickly recognize that even professors who claim to count classroom interaction as part of the overall grade rarely assign it a percentage, and sometimes use it as a justification for raising or not raising borderline grades.

On-line discussion allows all students to participate, gives students time to prepare a well thought out response, allows student and instructor feedback for responses, permits mutual collaboration, and can be archived for qualitative grading purposes. In addition, archiving facilitates long term evaluation of students when they return to ask for letters of reference for employers or grad school.

Such forums could be used as a newsmaking criminology tool if journalists and other media writers/producers were invited to join students in class discussion. This was facilitated in the crime and media course as the guest lecturers answered email from students and both questions and responses were posted using the discussion forum software.

2. Projects

I have several students whose projects represent uses of the web in ways that would constitute doing newsmaking criminology. Diop Kamua has a site dedicated to Police Complaint Reports. What he has done is phenomenal. Diop receives and investigates complaints of police misconduct from around the country, posting the resulting findings to his Web site. He also has an ongoing investigation of techniques used by police departments to discourage the public from reporting police misconduct. The investigation itself may move live via Webcam in the near future.

Steve Dykehouse, an MS student at the University of Alabama, is working on a thesis and I'm a member of his committee (perhaps the first truly virtual committee member). Steve is using link analyzing software to determine the patterns of criminal justice use of the Web, particularly who is linking to whom. For example, are police agencies linking only to other police agencies, or to court and correctional sites as well. Is a fully representative or only a truncated view of the criminal justice system available via the Web? The newsmaking criminology potential of these Web sites is great as reporters can locate and interact directly with those who work in the system. However, some agencies are only putting up their press releases with little additional information, leading to the same old feeding of stories to journalists.

As an offshoot of his thesis work and his many contacts with criminal justice webmasters, Steve founded a mailing list (CJHTML-L) just for them. In a little over a month over 100 webmasters joined the list. The list can become yet another forum for discussion of how to provide information for journalists and the public that will overcome traditional stereotypes. Steve has formed a board of prominent criminal justice webmasters to help promote, support, and manage the mailing list. These include: myself, Ira Wilsker, webmaster for Law Enforcement Sites on the Web (http://www.ih2000.net/ira/ira.htm) and Sergey Chapkey of Rule of Law On-line (http://www.rol.org/).

My hope is that more and more instructors will recognize the value of on-line discussion and Web dissemination of their own current research and student projects. Given the 12 to 24 month lag time associated with traditional publishing outlets such as paper journals and books, the Internet solves the problem of remaining timely. In addition, as policy decisions tend to be made, in many cases, prior to the dissemination of research studies, rapid dissemination of research will allow policy makers to make better informed choices. Of course, time needs to be made available for editing, peer comment, and review so that unpolished material is not posted, but these processes can be sped up by using the Web for collaborative review and editing.

Feedback

Given the plethora of activities and projects now underway, assessing their impact in order to better target future efforts is essential. Unfortunately, measurements of overall impact will never be precise as it difficult to chart who is using which of the provided materials for what purposes. To date, assessment has been based upon (1) personal email, (2) site awards and Web recognition, (3) hit counters, and (4) links analysis. In October, a survey was added to the Web site and over 150 responses collected.

The first four measures have been very encouraging. Personal email regarding the site averages about 5 notes a day. About half are complimentary messages about the value of the Web sites, many are questions regarding where on the Internet to find something, and a growing number are seeking more information on the FSU School of Criminology and Criminal Justice. The site has won a number of awards and been recognized both in computer/Internet magazines and on-line publications that feature Web site reviews such as Microsoft's Justice e-zine. While I never trust hit counters, the main CJ links page had well over 100,000 recorded hits in a year period. Another counter placed on the School's server, showed the main links page receiving about 1,000 visitors a week, a number matched by the FSU Criminology Home Page. It is possible that visits to all of the pages in the Web site are over 1,000,000 per year. Many of the pages in the Web site are indexed at the major search engines. Steve Dykehouse's link analysis has uncovered that the FSU site is linked from other criminal justice sites as often as the Cornell Law site, tied for the number one position of all academic criminology sites. The overall position among all CJ sites on the Web linked from other CJ pages is 4th or 5th, trailing only the FBI and other major government criminal justice sites. By mid-1996, over 1,000 other Web pages were linking to the main CJ links page. One could conclude that visibility of the site is extremely high.

In order to get a clearer picture of who is using the site and for what purposes an on-line survey was constructed and posted during October 1997. Over 150 valid responses were given. Questions asked included frequency of visits, the primary reason surfers were coming to the site, whether users were reading the on-line publications or only browsing links, suggestions for future improvements, plus a number of background questions (age, gender, education and/or CJ related training, occupation). Responses were coded and crosstabs run using SPSS by graduate student Steve Cooper:

• To view overall frequencies, click here.
• To view selected cross tabs, click here.
• To view text responses, click here.

Either no journalists answered the survey or they were unwilling to indicate their status. This made us wonder how many journalists actually use the Web to do story research, since I have been contacted via email a number of times by reporters. The recently concluded Media In Cyberspace Study II found dramatic increases in reporters use of the Internet from their 1994 study. As to what journalists want from the Internet:

Once editors and reporters go on line, they are interested in gathering reference materials, finding raw data (in particular, government data and corporate biographies), using e-mail and seeking out new sources for interviews. In that last function, editors and reporters will often use old-fashioned on-line Internet utilities such as LISTSERVs and Usenet newsgroups, as well as the World Wide Web.

Future Efforts

Given the current base to build upon, there are a number of ways to increase the impact of newsmaking criminology using the Internet. In fact, the problem is that there are too many opportunities rather than too few, so that selective use of available resources must be considered. We have a number of projects as various stages of development. As projects receive funding or institutional support they will be discussed here (as additions to this Web site) and at future meetings. Projects that can achieve multiple goals will be given higher priority. For example, in addition to fostering newsmaking criminology, the School of Criminology would like to develop an on-line version of its undergraduate curriculum, contribute to the overall distance learning efforts of FSU, assist in the collaborative use of Open University/FSU course materials, help criminal justice agencies make better use of information technologies including Web-based training, develop content to assist in transition to the rule of law in emerging democracies worldwide, and bring change to educational opportunities provided to those institutionalized in criminal justice facilities. Needless to say, we don't have a life!

Just to provide one example, FSU School of Criminology and the Foundation for Law and Society at FSU recently submitted a grant proposal to PBS in response to an RFP to fund Web site construction. We suggested the project be called: Talking Criminal Justice: A Collaborative Web Site for Crime Reporters, Criminologists, and Criminal Justice Professionals. A new Web site linked to our existing criminal justice pages will be used to interactively engage these three groups in dialog about both high profile media crime and legal stories, and significant areas the media appears to be ignoring. Technology used will include multi-media Web pages, on-line discussion formats, designated times for live chat on specific topics, daily postings of new crime stories (using Newsbot), etc. Evaluation of the program's success would be done through on-line surveys, hit counts, emails sent to the project director, and on-line recognition (awards won, reviews, etc.).

Bibliography Altheide, David. (1976). Creating reality: How Television news distorts events. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications. Barak, Gregg. (1988). Newsmaking criminology: Reflections on the media, intellectuals, and crime, Justice quarterly. 5(4), 565-587. Fishman, Mark. (1980). Manufacturing the news. Austin: University of Texas Press. Greek, Cecil. (1994). Becoming a Media Criminologist: Is "Newsmaking Criminology" Possible? in Barak, Gregg (ed.). Media, process, and the social construction of crime: Studies in newsmaking criminology. NY: Garland Press. Karp, D. and W. Yoels. (1976). A College Classroom: Some Observations on the Meanings of Student Participation. Sociology and Social Research. 60 (Fall): 421-439. Martin, Dannie M. and Peter Y. Sussman. (1993). Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red Hog. New York: W. W. Norton

Links to Other Sites of Interest for Newsmaking Criminology ABA Resource Team for High Profile Trials Abuse, Neglect and the Mass Media Cecil Greek's Criminal Justice Page: Media Issues Center for The Accurate Portrayal of Crime in the Media Critical Criminology (ASC) Division d i s i n f o r m a t i o n FAIR -- Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting Free Speech TV GuestFinder: Media Resource for Guests, Experts, and Story Ideas Is Media Violence Free Speech? George Gerbner v. Todd Gitlin Media Coverage, Crime News, & Trial Reporting Books Media and News Megasites Media In Cyberspace Study II Media Policy Clearinghouse Mediahype: Dutch site maintained by Peter Vasterman 'Newsmaking Criminology': Responding to a Mediated Fear of Crime Newsweek Media Research Index On-Line Visual Literacy Project Vanderbilt Television News Archive Victims and the Media Yahoo! - News and Media: Current Events Please submit additional links. They will be added here.