Lights. Camera. Crime.
A 35-year-old scar won’t let Tyrone Williams forget the day Action and Eyewitness News trucks rolled down his block.
“I remember … [the] Saturday, like it was yesterday,” Williams said, “because, at this time, I’m scarred for life from this stabbing.”
Williams was 20 years old when a group of white men and teenagers attacked him and his family outside their Olney home. One of the attackers, he remembered, used the N-word before jumping his brother Barry and attempting to stab their mother. Williams was trying to protect her when a knife went into his torso, puncturing his lung.
“I could’ve died,” Williams, now 55, recalled.
His attackers targeted the family in a case of racist mistaken identity after they’d exchanged words with a different group of African American men and boys near the now-shuttered Fern Rock Theater, Williams said.
There’s been trouble like this many times before. It’s just that no one bothered to report it. That was how Eyewitness News reporter Joyce Evans summed up coverage of the white-on-Black beating that put Williams in the hospital. When Action News’ Vernon Odom covered the same crime that evening, surviving footage described the area, then predominantly white, as “one of the town’s most racially explosive neighborhoods.”
Barry Williams, Tyrone’s brother, told the reporters he was sitting on the porch when the group of white males approached. “They beat the mess out of us,” he said.
A More Perfect Union is a special project from The Inquirer examining the roots of systemic racism through institutions founded in Philadelphia. Read the series →
The institution of local broadcast news is a young one, but among the most ubiquitous in the United States. It’s a pair of routines that unfold each night: As Americans gather to wind down their days, the medium has worked to deepen racial tensions and reinforce racial stereotypes about communities of color.
This format launched in Philadelphia, first with the birth of Eyewitness News in 1965, and then with Action News in 1970. Over the next few generations, the pervasive and seductive twin broadcasts would spread to stations across the country — and with them, negative narratives about neighborhoods that would effectively “other” certain groups based largely on race, class, and zip code.
More than half a century later, the impact of this efficient and pioneering approach remains, but continues to be condemned as harmful, as critics call for a reimagining of stories that tell a fuller story of communities, one that more accurately captures the humanity and dignity of all who live there.
A formula on repeat in millions of homes
The story of the moment that changed Williams’ life came 11 minutes and 45 seconds into the 6 p.m. Eyewitness News broadcast. It came after a round of updates from a South Philadelphia “shootout” featured twice in the preceding 5:30 broadcast, a few clips about a corruption case unfolding in the city, and a dive into an all-white South Jersey motorcycle gang operating a meth ring.
One in three of the news segments featured in the hour’s worth of news that summer evening related to crime, disaster, corruption, or violence. One of the day’s top stories focused on a Black mother experiencing a mental health emergency over losing custody of her child. That situation was categorized as a hostage crisis.
Between the scenes of desperation, lawlessness, and urban chaos, ads featuring white families sold cars, bank loans, household cleaning supplies, and pizza dinners.
It was a broadcast like any other, a local news formula on repeat that played nightly in millions of homes — first, across the Philadelphia region where it was born, and then, in tens of millions more around the nation.
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Decades later, Williams remains ambivalent about the news media that put his family on television on one of their most traumatic days. He feels Evans and Odom — two pioneering Black journalists — did their best to tell his story. Yet, for the thousands of people who watched their influential broadcasts, that story began and ended with a single violent encounter, leaving a first and last impression of a neighborhood that held many other, more positive memories for Williams and his fellow residents.
Williams is still stunned by some of the details from his stabbing. The 16-year-old perpetrator was only charged with ethnic intimidation, Williams said. Police who responded to the scene, Williams said, left him there, bleeding — their indifference only compounding his injuries.
“The cops there were racist too,” Williams said. ”They were taking their time getting me to the hospital. I almost died.”
These were layers of the nearly fatal race clash that weren’t explored at all by the reporters who covered the violence.
Neither Eyewitness nor Action News, it seems, returned to Olney when police made an arrest in the case. They didn’t follow up when additional charges were reportedly filed against Barry Williams and his father for allegedly daring to have words with the white males in the lead-up to the violence, as if a few insults were on the same level as being literally stabbed in the back. After a newspaper report on the additional charges in early August, print journalists at The Inquirer and other local newspapers stopped following up as well.
“I never really saw the news there,” he said of his working-class neighborhood, now multiracial after generations of white flight. “I guess only when something blew up.”
‘Funny, bloody, and quick’
There “when something blew up” could have been a tagline for the nightly programs that have defined local television news since 1965, when an up-and-coming Philadelphia news director named Al Primo rolled out the nation’s first episode of Eyewitness News.
The new breed of local news would transform how Americans received the day’s headlines. It would even change the substance of the news itself. Before Eyewitness appeared on America’s small screens, local television news hardly existed, with national stories dominating the day’s headlines as anchors vied for spots at big-city network markets. And it was delivered largely behind a desk, by a suited white man in a series of passive sentences.
Primo repackaged the day’s events as infotainment — a fast-paced series of vignettes delivered by a “news family,” complete with a male-female pair of attractive, bantering anchors and intrepid reporters interviewing sources on the scene.
The station quickly climbed the ratings charts and inspired imitators nationwide. Soon, the networks were drawn to a new approach that hooked viewers with a mix of sensational headlines and emotional human interest stories.
More viewers meant more money for ads. The medium of television was exploding and so were the prices associated with prime time, when more Americans than ever were tuning in for news.
“The minute we put the Eyewitness News format into place, the ratings started increasing. Increased rating means increased revenue,” said Primo, now 87 and living in Old Greenwich, Conn.
In 1968, the TV executive jumped to an ABC affiliate in New York to launch Eyewitness News there; by 1970, more than 35 stations had adopted the approach, many of them also copying the branding.
That year, another Philadelphia station, envious of KYW-TV’s ratings, sought to make an even more profitable newscast. WPVI-TV’s answer was Action News, a faster-paced, intentionally more upbeat and entertaining format. Within a year, WPVI shot to the top from its long-held spot at the bottom of the rankings, former producer and executive Bob Feldman said.
The Action News formula delivered more coverage of crime in less time.
“Funny, bloody, and quick, somebody referred to it as. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll watch him die,” Odom recalled of Action News, which he joined in 1976 as one of its most prominent Black reporters.
The two Philly originals — Eyewitness and Action News — spread to major markets in more than 200 U.S. cities from Atlanta to San Francisco.
In the space of a generation, Primo and his industry rivals had turned local television news into an American institution — one that lit up tens of millions of homes each evening around dinnertime.
Nightly narratives starkly contrasted the city and suburbs
As local TV news ratings rose and ad earnings rolled in through the end of the 20th century, Philadelphia lost hundreds of thousands of white residents to the suburban locales seen in newscast commercials for four-door sedans, Ethan Allen bedroom sets, and real estate brokerages. Images of white families in tidy subdivisions and spacious homes broke up dispatches that more often than not cast the city and its Black residents in a negative light.
Network executives had figured out how to extract news that entertained and attracted viewers with a familiar story line: An endless loop with scenes of dangerous urban streets.
“Crime became a large part of all the newscasts of the city, and I'll tell you why,” former Action News anchor Larry Kane, now 79, said in a recent interview. “Crime was cheap to cover. It was easy to cover. [The assignment desk] said to the cameraman, ‘You shoot the scene, you shoot the blood, you shoot victims, whatever they got.’ And you can do it in 20 seconds.”
Most of the time, those cameramen were documenting crime in certain neighborhoods where poverty and decades of failed social policies had given way to higher rates of crime and population loss.
Longtime Action News reporter Mike Strug, who joined the station in 1966 and went on to spend four decades in local television news, recalled reporting shifts spent listening to the police scanner at the corner of Kensington and Allegheny Avenues, waiting for a crime to occur. The working-class, multiracial neighborhood has struggled with drugs, addiction, violence, and poverty for decades.
The format didn't often encourage reporters to return to the scene of the crime, follow up on root causes or the lives affected, or document the good in complex neighborhoods like Kensington— where, just like everywhere else, people live, work, and play.
In a 1974 Inquirer interview, Kane explained that consumer surveys by Frank Magid, a psychologist and statistician turned media consultant, influenced coverage, too. The goal was to give viewers what they wanted so ratings would soar and stations could sell ads. Magid, known as the “News Doctor,” Kane said, told TV executives to focus on crime.
By 1987, violence and crime were the crux of Primo’s news formula too, according to studies of TV stations that hired him to guide their programming. Between that year and 1990, 40% of all television news stories about violence and crime came from Primo-consulted stations, according to an analysis of the impact of consultants on local news programming. His stations covered crime and violence five times as much as stations that didn’t hire him.
Letrell Crittenden, a media scholar at the American Press Institute, said the constant stream of urban crime coverage discouraged empathy and harmed those already vulnerable to whatever crisis has made the news.
“This format is specifically geared toward telling the pain and tragedy of these communities without any real attempt to provide a greater context for the everyday lived experience in these communities,” Crittenden said.
While national and local newscasts pointed fingers at each other for sensationalized coverage of “racial disturbances,” these news formats that undervalued depth and privileged drama continued to spread.
There was little incentive for local news stations to change course.
According to an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Survey of Broadcast Journalism, local news was often a station’s “biggest money maker” by the mid-1970s and the TV medium had at that point become America’s biggest source of news. And with many local news shows enjoying large year-to-year increases in viewership — more than 9% for many local stations in the 1970s — more eyes were on the sensationalized problems of cities like Philadelphia than ever before.
Studies, including a 1979 Department of Justice report, suggest that the relentless focus on lawlessness influenced approaches to policing and incarceration. Newspaper and television depictions of “non-whites being arrested more often than whites” could be responsible for the idea that people of color committed more street crime despite a lack of reliable statistical proof, the DOJ report said.
That tide of crime stories that disproportionately represented Black people as perpetrators and victims affected perceptions in damaging ways.
“If I see a black person on TV, it's usually about a crime that they have committed. They were actually making me scared of my own people,” said Sajda “Purple” Blackwell, 45, a West Philadelphia activist and mediamaker who grew up in Chester watching Eyewitness and Action News as the format took hold in her backyard and across the country. “There was a fear being instilled in me very young when watching the news.”
Trusted “family” in an unfamiliar city
The media's racialization of crime didn’t start with television news.
One of the first known examples of Black people correcting a racist, criminal media narrative happened in Philadelphia, during a health crisis in 1793. Christian leaders and abolitionists Richard Allen and Absalom Jones printed a pamphlet correcting the record of Mathew Carey, a white man who accused Black Philadelphians of plundering the sick while caring for yellow fever victims.
In the early 20th century, racist anecdotes printed in newspapers were used to justify the pervasive culture of lynching, vigilante justice, and the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan, said historian and Temple University journalism chair David Mindich. Sometimes, such as in the case of the Tulsa, Okla., race massacre of 1921, the media lit the flames.
For many Philadelphians, the fight against racial injustice became a headline that couldn’t be ignored in 1964, when Columbia Avenue erupted in riots. A false rumor that a white police officer killed a pregnant Black woman had lit a match to long-simmering anger over chasmed race relations and institutionalized Black poverty.
Civil rights giants like Cecil B. Moore and Leon H. Sullivan led charges for Black equality but spoke against riotous destruction and Black militarism. In the coming few years, though, the Black Panthers, a more militant liberation organization, would gain a prominent foothold in the city.
Across the political spectrum, Black Philadelphia clashed with the conservative law-and-order politics that rose in the 1970s under the racially divisive leadership of Mayor Frank Rizzo. The former police commissioner would infamously order officers to beat civil rights protesters and cultivate an environment where police shot civilians at a rate of one per week between 1970 and 1978.
Rizzo reigned over a shrinking city — people were leaving Philadelphia for growing suburbs as industry that had thrived through the midcentury retracted and relocated while white-collar companies moved to new office parks outside the city.
A city that was home to more than two million people in 1950 lost more than 260,000 residents between 1970 and 1980, most of them white. As Black leaders continued to fight for equal rights, neighborhood investment, and services, City Hall grappled with a limited budget of tax dollars already stretched thin.
These dynamics of flight and fiscal strain were already in motion in 1965 when Primo took the reins at Philly’s Westinghouse broadcast station, KYW-TV. Joining the station after 12 years working his way up from the mailroom at another station, he was barely 30 and ambitious.
Primo designed his Eyewitness format to keep viewers engaged by having reporters step out from behind the anchor desk and onto the streets of Philadelphia, where the world seemed to be rapidly changing. Rather than deliver a somber, lecture-style recitation of current events, coanchors Marciarose Shestack, Philadelphia's first “full-fledged woman newscaster,” and Tom Snyder jumped from story to story, most segments filling less than two minutes, with the aid of on-site footage gathered by a team of reporters and camera crews.
After realizing reporters could appear on air without additional compensation, Primo assigned beats and assembled the first “family” of news people. The structure paired men and women to anchor together, bringing a familiar nuclear domesticity into the newscast.
Most often, the anchors were white. The format invited an emotional connection with viewers and foreshadowed the rise of infotainment. It was an approach to news that would reshape media and America’s understanding of the cities that became network news’ stages.
“They said ‘it was not journalism’ and ‘he’s using show-business techniques,’” Primo said of the critics who challenged his media makeover. “And of course, I said, ‘Yes, that's right. This is television, so we use lights, camera, action — that's what we do.’ But we do the news, too.”
Philadelphia had long been a site of innovation in the world of television. Channel 3, where Eyewitness News was born, was the city’s first station, growing out of the experimental station W3XE in the early 1930s and receiving its FCC commercial license in 1941.
Over the following decades, Philadelphians and Americans alike increasingly tuned in to their television sets for entertainment. The tube became a medium for the masses. Compared with newspapers and magazines, TV news was the most accessible because it was effectively free for households with television sets and it became the most popular source of news for Americans, a status it still holds. For the privilege of access to public airwaves, stations promised to dedicate airtime to reporting on matters of import to communities. But in an industry where higher ratings meant bigger profits, the temptation to lure viewers by turning news into entertainment eventually undercut well-intentioned commitments to public service.
Primo believed the public good his format offered was a newsroom that looked more like the changing American communities. Soon after taking a top role at the station, he began meeting with civic leaders in Philadelphia about problems with the station’s coverage and, through a series of monthly meetings, began to understand the need to diversify newsrooms filled with white men.
“What it did for me was really highlight the fact that there was no minority representation on the station,” Primo said. “And so I began to look around for someone who was qualified to join the team.”
He remembers getting pushback from others at the station who were not ready to bring others to the table. In the end, he said, the argument came back to business.
“Frankly, it was an economic attempt to get ratings and to get an audience that will believe in you and feel that you're fair and equal,” Primo said. “It would give you an edge over everybody just to have the courage to do that. And it took a lot of courage.”
He found Trudy Haynes in Detroit, where she had made television history as the first African American weatherperson on television. Primo recruited her to Philadelphia with an alluring position as the city’s first Black TV news reporter, which paid $13,000 — almost double the median family income, but an average rate for television reporters at the time.
“We didn't know there was another color but white, because that's all that we had at the station at that time,” said Haynes, now 95 and still perfectly coiffed.
“When I went out on the story, I did what I thought the story should be about. And I made a point when they were edited to include whatever our brown story was,” Haynes explained. She had no time for editors who tried to cut people of color out of her pieces, she said. They had to stay. “I demanded it,” she said.
It wasn’t easy. At the very start of Eyewitness News, Haynes said, there was “very little” coverage of the African American community. When Black people did make the news, it was about “accidents or murders,” she said. She said that her newsroom didn’t set out to look for those stories, but when they broke, she often got assigned to cover them.
It became obvious to her that the station needed more journalists of color to cover nonwhite communities more deeply. (To read about The Inquirer’s struggles with racism and diversity, see the first installment of the A More Perfect Union project.)
“We needed to tell our own stories about our own people,” Haynes said.
‘Failing to portray’ Black communities as a ‘matter of routine’
By 1967, the anger over racist policing and inequity that sent hundreds of people into the streets of North Philadelphia in 1964 was exploding across the country.
That summer, protests and riots broke out in more than 160 American cities and towns. Forty-three people died in Detroit and 26 in Newark. President Lyndon B. Johnson created a task force to examine what had led to the summer’s violence and how the racial unrest could be remedied.
The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, led by Gov. Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois, dedicated an entire chapter to the media's role in the unrest. The Kerner Commission determined that while television networks and newspapers had “made a real effort” to integrate Black leaders into their coverage of the civil rights movement and report fairly, they missed the mark when it came to covering the racial uprisings, exaggerating violence and failing to capture the tone of events accurately.
The American media, the commission declared in the report, continually failed to adequately report on the root causes of racial unrest specifically, and Black America in general.
“If what the white American reads in the newspapers or sees on television conditions his expectation of what is ordinary and normal in the larger society, he will neither understand nor accept the black American,” the commission said. “By failing to portray the Negro as a matter of routine and in the context of the total society, the news media have, we believe, contributed to the black-white schism in this country.”
Five decades after the watershed government study dropped, Primo remembers it only vaguely. He acknowledges that his newsroom didn’t cover the civil rights movement with the care and attention it deserved. That was, in part, because of the lack of Black staff and leadership at the station.
Philadelphia’s Shifting Racial Mix
Philadelphia lost more than 260,000 residents between 1970 and 1980 as Eyewitness News and Action News climbed the rankings and gained viewers across the region. Most of the people who left the city were white and many settled in nearby suburbs. Consultants hired by TV networks at that time advised executives to target suburban viewers.
“We didn’t go in depth like I wanted to because, to be perfectly honest with you, we didn’t have the intelligence and input in the community to dig that deep in,” he said.
None of that could interrupt the meteoric rise of his Eyewitness model. But what Primo didn’t anticipate was how his success would breed more media innovation — and racial inequity — in cities around the nation.
The format’s shallow coverage fed into and perpetuated perceptions of Philadelphia’s troubles as endemic and unsolvable in a city that was becoming more Black and less white by the year.
As the television networks ascended in ratings and revenue, American perceptions of urban life and the people who lived in increasingly diverse cities were in free fall. Philadelphia, like many urban centers nationwide, was grappling with growing poverty, police brutality, and the exodus of industry and the tax dollars it brought — complex problems that could not easily be explained in 15-second clips.
Predominantly white suburban communities, meanwhile, experienced their 15 seconds of fame differently.
Action News, in 1970, created a whole new category of news content designed to appeal to the suburban families targeted by advertisers. One day, cameras zoomed in on a backyard festival. Another day, a reporter interviewed a group of Montgomery County Community College students who spent a few hours cleaning up trash littering a local road.
A photographer was hired with one job: “Every day,” Strug said, “he had to shoot three events out in the suburbs.”
If nothing else, the suburban coverage offered a more balanced look at what it meant to be white in the region. Maybe a white man's mug shot flashed on television, but a few moments later, viewers could see fair-haired families laughing in the sun.
Black viewers, especially those living in Philadelphia, were afforded no such nuance.
Financial incentives for sensational coverage
Study after study showed local news did have a crime problem and it was drawn along the color line.
University of Pennsylvania professor Dan Romer analyzed Philadelphia’s broadcast networks in 1998 and found Black people were more likely to be portrayed as the perpetrators of crime rather than victims, despite facts showing the opposite is true. Romer theorized financial incentives led news decision-makers to exaggerate the harm people of color inflict on white people.
“The suburbs are the target for their advertisers because they have more wealthy households and they tend to be white,” Romer said in an interview. “Showing people of color attacking whites, that's scary stuff. Now, that's a cynical view. But I mean, it's a business.”
Romer and his team approached news station heads with their findings. Media executives pushed back against the suggestion that they perpetuate damaging criminal stereotypes with unrealistic frequency, he recalled. Instead, they said they were “just telling the news.”
The criminal portrayals of the city and of Black people came with policy implications, Romer said. Even as the crime wave of the 1990s ebbed, analyses of local TV news showed coverage of violence didn’t relent.
“If the public always thinks that crime is a problem, it's going to support things like incarceration, more police, all the things that we now see could have adverse effects on certain communities, especially communities that are disadvantaged,” Romer said.
From the beginning, news icons like Walter Cronkite criticized Eyewitness News, Action News, and the effect of consultants on media in general, as a sensationalized money grab. The speed compromised the depth.
Today, Primo bristles at the critique and deflects to the impact of his former rival, Action News. He took particular aim at Action News’ impact on crime coverage.
“To be honest with you, I think that one of the things that was troubling in the early days was this Action News report that was started in Philadelphia,” he said. “And it was definitely an attempt to regain or to get some leadership over Eyewitness News.”
It worked, and Primo said there’s no doubt Eyewitness News felt the pressure to increase its own speed and sensationalism to compete.
Feldman, who helped manage Action News in the 1970s and 1980s, admits the format may have lacked depth. He pushes back, though, at the idea that the Action News approach to violence and disaster fueled public anxiety.
“I hope we presented those stories in a way that would not make people fearful,” he said. “I don't think we ever did that.”
Action News reporter Vernon Odom joined WPVI in 1976 as one of the station’s first Black reporters. His newsroom felt like “paradise” compared with the post-Jim Crow Atlanta station he came from, he recalled. Still, he added that some of his white colleagues failed to cover diverse communities fairly.
“I was a good reporter and a good journalist and always able to give perspective on certain stories,” Odom said. “A lot of white reporters did not have the background or the inclination to want to do [it]. And that's about as frank as I can put it.”
Odom, who retired in 2018, covered hard news over the course of his more than four-decade career. He said he always strove to report deeply on Black communities and approach issues with a balanced perspective his bosses supported.
“I'm not saying everything was perfect, that’s the last thing I'm saying,” he said. “But by and large, after my experiences down South, I sometimes was amazed at what we were covering, which was positive stuff.”
A 1977 segment reported by Action News’ Jim Gardner, who joined the station in 1976 and reigned as the city’s most beloved, recognizable journalism institution before announcing his retirement in 2021, chronicled the success of House of Umoja in West Philadelphia in a two-and-a-half-minute package. The neighborhood-based, anti-gang violence organization and boys’ home had a proven track record of protecting children, rescuing boys from gang life and using West African principals of a family structure to build them up.
“The House of Umoja is also a second chance for warriors of neighborhood gangs … to become productive young men and to understand that society really wants them and needs them,” Gardner said. Then, the organization's leader offered a glimpse into the challenges her boys faced out in the world.
What preceded that report, though, was a barrage of crime briefs that typified local TV news. An overturned death sentence for a Georgia rapist, an abducted Florida Girl Scout, court coverage of a local mob chief, Kensington gang violence that left eight people shot, and police “fearful of a long, hot summer on the streets of Philadelphia.”
Across America, TV networks focused their gaze on violence happening in urban communities. That coverage of violence became so disproportionate that in 1994, U.S. District Judge Clyde S. Cahill Jr. in Missouri cited it for his refusal to sentence a Black defendant for a crack-cocaine offense. The judge argued that frenzied rhetoric fanned by the media led Congress to usurp legislative processes to pass racist antidrug legislation that went against the logic of data.
“Today,” he wrote, “there are so many senseless crimes whose gory details are displayed in living color on living room TVs in America that people, inured to the bloodshed, simply retreat in horror from the senseless details.” In a one-year span between 1985 and 1986, one analysis Cahill cited found more than 400 reports about crack had been broadcast by television networks.
“Many of these stories were racist,” Cahill continued. “Legislators used these media accounts as informational support for the enactment of the crack statute.”
The Next Nightly News
In the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd in 2020 in Minneapolis, media, including local television news, was one of many American institutions protested. People voiced anger over seeing their communities traumatized and exploited by networks and newspapers that failed to hold racist systems accountable while profiting from the death and tragedy created by those same systems.
For the companies that own Eyewitness News and Action News, 2020 served as a call to action, station executives said in comments prepared for The Inquirer, which faced its own racial reckoning that year.
ABC, which owns WPVI’s Action News, introduced race and culture reporter positions across all eight of its stations last year. WPVI transitioned reporter TaRhonda Thomas to the role in March 2021 and she’s since done pieces about Black arts and culture, racism inside local government, and community organizations giving back. “Our mission is to amplify the voices of the underrepresented and marginalized communities. I accomplish this through listening first, and then storytelling,” Thomas said in a statement shared with The Inquirer.
WPVI exec Rob Royal said the station held newsroom discussions during and after 2020’s George Floyd protests and relies on its data team for analysis that helps provide historic context and depth to stories about police killings and other news related to racial injustice.
Bernie Prazenica, president and general manager at WPVI, said that the station and its ABC-owned peers began working to address racial disparities on the air before 2020 because a survey revealed audiences “wanted to see more inclusive content.” He noted that the docuseries "Our America: Living While Black” as well as other efforts came out of that call for inclusion.
“Additionally, we continue to evaluate internally to uncover any shortcomings and to understand what we are doing right,” Prazenica said in an emailed response to questions. “We have continually progressed in our storytelling by informing our journalists of best practices through DEI training and companywide initiatives designed to educate and broaden our perspectives on diversity.”
CBS Philly, which owns Eyewitness News, said the station is doing more to showcase positive community stories.
“We are also doing more to introduce our audiences to the people and places in local neighborhoods that may otherwise be overlooked,” an emailed statement reads. “An important part of our mission is to showcase the champions and change-makers among us.”
The station said it has created a new, community-oriented producer role to foster “more grassroots relationships … at the neighborhood level.”
More change is needed, said Linn Washington, an investigative reporter, journalism professor at Temple University, and author who’s reported in Philadelphia since 1970. His assessment: The mainstream news media need to look at crime and violence holistically after 50 years of treating violence like a series of independent episodes.
“To do a more systemic approach to crime is tied to poor schools, poor economic opportunities,” Washington explained. “It may ruffle some feathers, it may alienate some advertisers. It’s a matter of how you construct the minute that you have.”
In West Philadelphia, “Purple” Blackwell has spent the last few years growing PQRadio1.com, a neighborhood-based politics and music radio station. There, she represents her people differently than Action and Eyewitness News, she said, but she’s also starting to notice slow-drip adjustments to mainstream media coverage. She attributes the changes to 2020’s protests as well as the escalation of Philadelphia’s gun violence crisis.
Eyewitness and Action News “have slightly begun to pivot to realize that, ‘You know what? We're behind the eight ball in reporting on what’s going on as far as the people who are trying to be solutionary,’” Blackwell said.
The last two years in Philadelphia saw murder rates rise to historic levels, bringing with them lifelong impacts for affected families and surviving victims. Honoring those victims and communities is important — and is news. Striving for more balanced coverage of gun violence victims and their families, instead of an overemphasis on white victims, is one way researcher Romer suggested crime coverage could improve.
In the 1960s, when racism sparked a nationwide series of riots and uprisings, experts implicated the media in perpetuating the Black-white divide and called on them to do better. African Americans and other people of color were hired and pioneers like Trudy Haynes and Vernon Odom took on the personal responsibility of representing their Black communities with balance and fairness.
Whether those hires, the effort, or the fundamental staff diversification affected corporate-owned local news institutions is tougher to answer.
“Institutional change?” Haynes wondered aloud. “I don’t know that they felt the same way I did, but I did my best to stay [at KYW]. … And I stayed on for almost 30 years.”
Eyewitness News and Action News have lived through several cycles of racial unrest and decades of sustained movement for civil rights. Nearly two years after television viewers watched former police officer Derek Chauvin murder George Floyd, the question remains how newsmakers will meet the current moment.
“This is gonna be a fight,” Crittenden predicted, “for the future of journalism.”
Editor’s Note
This account was based on archival news and documentary footage, research, and extensive interviews with current and former news executives, current and former reporters, media scholars, historians, and Philadelphia residents. This account comes after an examination of The Inquirer’s struggles with racism and diversity reported by an independent journalist and published in February.
Correction
A quote published in a previous version of this article misstated the date of a stabbing that occurred on July 25, 1987.
Acknowledgement
A More Perfect Union is produced with support from The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, Lisa D. Kabnick and John H. McFadden, Peter and Judy Leone, and Surdna Foundation. Editorial content is created independently of the project’s donors.
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