Panelists included former CBS-TV news anchor Dan Rather, Philadelphia District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham, NBC10 news director Chris Blackman, Inquirer editor William K. Marimow, and WRNB-FM commentator E. Steven Collins.
To keep the topic focused, the forum asked a narrow question: "What does the public need to know about how TV covers crime?"
It began with a brief film clip of Garrison, a public relations man hired by the family of Casey Anthony, a Florida woman charged with the murder of her baby daughter, Caylee.
In prerecorded remarks, Garrison explained that he was hired to "keep the [Caylee Anthony] story alive" by offering himself repeatedly to TV stations, and boasted of stirring the media into "feeding frenzy" over the tragedy of this appealing - and white - child.
Later, the program looked at how Philadelphia area TV stations cover crime, and how coverage shapes perceptions of race and the city itself.
Blackman, of NBC10, acknowledged that "crime is the easiest story to cover" for TV news crews. "You go to the scene, you shoot the crime-scene tape, and you've got your story."
But an abundance of crime stories can also provoke undue anxiety in viewers, portray a city as more violent than it really is, and perpetuate ethnic stereotypes, according to Blackman.
Marimow, of The Inquirer, began by observing that the First Amendment's press protections seek "to give citizens the opportunity to decide if public officers are doing their jobs," but TV journalism is often skewed towards crime because "TV needs pictures" to tell a story.
Its dependence on images and the brevity of most reports make it hard for TV to report important stories with requisite complexity, said Marimow. "If you only have a minute, you can't tell a story."
