Reform in the Media: Analyzing How Local Media Covered New York’s Criminal Legal Reform Narrative

The media plays an important role in educating the public and elected officials alike about the details and impact of public policy. But can the media itself be a part of that impact – influencing legislation in important policy context? After New York passed the nation’s most comprehensive pretrial reform legislation in 2019, the media’s coverage of crime and the impacts of criminal legal system reform went from part of the news cycle to being a topic of discussion itself. Supporters of the reforms have argued that news media coverage significantly influenced calls to amend the legislation three months after the law went into effect, as well as the amendments passed in early 2022 and 2023.

As a part of CUNY ISLG’s multi-year process evaluation examining how criminal legal system agencies put the reforms into practice (with support from Arnold Ventures), we sought to analyze the content of local media coverage of the legislation to understand its potential impact on public perception of the reform and how it may affect public and political pressure to amend the legislation. This in-depth, rigorous review of media coverage around the reforms in New York expanded on previous research efforts through a systematic coding and analysis of a sample of news articles produced by eight news outlets across the State, the majority of which were local with one national outlet headquartered in New York City, published from January 1, 2019 through June 30, 2022.

Overall, our findings suggest that media coverage of the reforms lacked details about the legislation’s purpose and specific changes to the pretrial process, disproportionately focused on perspectives that were critical of the legislation, and emphasized the perceived negative impacts to community safety. This played out in 6 key ways:

1. Not explaining how the reforms changed the criminal legal process and for what purpose, often failing to provide details beyond attention-grabbing headlines about the reform’s impacts;

2. Disproportionately covering perceived negative consequences of the reforms, with little coverage of perceived benefits to people and communities;

3.  Attributing rising crime to the reforms without providing evidence to support the claim, with little to no attention to recent research that has shown no relationship between the two;

4. Highlighting cases that were not actually impacted by the new bail eligibility requirements as examples of the reform’s problems, including a series of highly publicized incidents of hate violence;

5.  Using stigmatizing language that suggested the guilt and inherent dangerousness of individuals charged with a new offense while out on pretrial release; and

6. Increasing coverage of narratives critical of the legislation prior to elections or budget sessions, widening the gap between positive and negative coverage even further during these particularly influential times.

Rooted in the findings from this analysis and lessons learned from the larger process evaluation, ISLG illuminates the value of a centralized and coordinated public education and awareness campaign to educate the public and media, combat misinformation, and correct falsehoods and makes a recommendation to other jurisdictions considering implementation of similar types of criminal legal system reform to consider this as a crucial step in their planning and implementation process.