Why is there so much violence but so little else on local TV news?

Because murder is easy. Shootings are sometimes amusing and a TV reporter can turn such filler around in a matter of minutes. The self-contained simplicity of mayhem makes it a highly profitable television enterprise.

Take the true-life example of two knucklehead police detectives nicknamed Pooky and Willy. It’s a warm summer evening. Children are out. Frothy drinks are being had. Pooky is hanging with his crew on one side of the street in front of an abandoned school. Willy is partying with his boys on a porch on the other side of the street.

A cross-boulevard argument breaks out between Pooky and Willy over who makes the best Kool-Aid.

How best to make Kool-Aid? Sugar and water. There is no other way to make Kool-Aid, excepting for the odd dash of lime. But that is beside the point. The point is the disrespect one man utters about another man’s culinary skills. Guns are pulled, shots are fired, two innocent bystanders—children—are ferried to the hospital.

TV combs the scene now. People on the block give interviews.

What’s this world coming to? says one.

He had so much life in front of him, says another.

And so forth.

If a reporter is particularly lucky, he may elicit a tear or two.

There is crime tape and an official police report. This nutshell of the human drama can be cranked out in forty minutes. It can take even less time depending on the reporter’s skill or a request for a live shot from the director’s desk. It’s like making melted-cheese sandwiches. You can flip them all day long.

We reporters rarely ask questions about that abandoned school: why it still stands or why children don’t learn. Or why police detectives have not managed to apprehend either Pooky or Willy, much less ascertained their real names. Or why handguns are as easy to come by as Tic Tacs. Questions like these muck things up. Slow the process. Mess up the money.

We will not admit it in the course of our Emmy acceptance speeches, but we reporters know that our work has a corrosive effect, amplifying anxiety in the suburban kitchen. It reinforces stereotypes of a violent black city, which may have its truths, but the extent of the violence is blown wildly out of proportion.

Watching TV, you’d think the whole city was bleeding cherry red.