Materially Misleading: How The Houston Chronicle’s Coverage of Bond Misinforms The Public

By Elaine Hennig and Jay Jenkins 

The media performs a powerful role in the policy arena, not simply because its reporting informs the public, but because its editorial decisions have the potential to influence public opinion and determine which issues capture the public’s attention. In this report series, we explore the role of local Houston media outlets in shaping the narrative of bond reform. To provide some background: Since Harris County’s misdemeanor bond system was first declared unconstitutional by a federal district court in 2017, the county has implemented several reforms as part of the resulting settlement. Before the resolution of the lawsuit, indigent defendants were detained pretrial solely based on their inability to pay bond, while their wealthier counterparts could post bond and expect prompt release. The county corrected this wealth-based discrimination by requiring the majority of misdemeanor defendants to be released on personal recognizance bonds, which do not require an upfront cash payment. By providing defendants with a new system for bonding out of jail that does not discriminate based on income, the implemented reforms ensure that defendants are not prematurely punished with jail time—upholding the principle of a ‘presumption of innocence’ for the criminally accused, and preventing taxpayers from footing the bill for unnecessary weeks or months of incarceration. Yet despite the more equitable reforms to Harris County’s misdemeanor system, opponents of bond reform frequently criticize the changes. In Part I of this report series, we analyzed the impact of six Houston-area television stations, demonstrating that these outlets consistently provided a platform for opponents of bond reform to frame pretrial release as a threat to public safety, both through the propagation of false narratives and the exploitation of race-based disparities. In Part II, we turn to newspaper media, aiming to understand the Houston Chronicle’s coverage of bond. This report draws on a content analysis of ϰϵϵ news articles published by the Chronicle between January 2015 and December 2021. Stories qualified for selection if they discussed bond reform, bond debates, and/or people who allegedly committed crimes while released on bond. In the context of Harris County bond policies, the media contributes to the local discourse on bond in two major ways: 1) through its coverage of bond reform, which informs the public about the impetus for reform and the debates surrounding bond-related policy changes, and 2) through its coverage of crime, which concretizes these policy discussions by drawing the reader’s attention to specific cases involving bond. Through our analysis, we found that the Houston Chronicle provided balanced and informative coverage of bond reform, but the newspaper sacrificed its impartiality by disseminating negative coverage of legally innocent defendants who were rearrested while released on bond. The Chronicle can be commended for its balanced coverage of bond reform itself, but the impact of its biased crime coverage on the bond reform discourse should not be underestimated. Research demonstrates that much of the general public’s understanding of crime comes from consumption of mass media. Because the media has the discretion to determine which crime stories are newsworthy, the criminal cases elevated in the media are usually the most extreme, statistically rare cases, selected to capture the public’s attention. As a consequence of this disproportionate coverage of the most sensational cases, the public gains a distorted perception of crime that leads to heightened fear of victimization. In the context of bond, this distortion is achieved through the coverage of stories about a  defendant rearrested for a violent crime while released on bond. Although such an occurrence is statistically rare, its frequency is exaggerated in crime coverage, which has the effect of generating public fear of pretrial release. Crime coverage, therefore, has just as much potential to inform the public’s perspective on bond reform as news coverage that directly addresses bond policies. Though the ChƌŽŶicůe͛Ɛ crime coverage undeniably impacts the public’s perception of bond release, our analysis demonstrates that this coverage does little to inform the public about the arrest, bond, and case dismissal process. Our review of the criminal cases covered by the Chronicle reveals that many had not reached a disposition at the time of our analysis; it also reveals a high proportion of case dismissals among the cases that did reach a disposition. The high proportion of unresolved and dismissed cases shows these stories focus on unproven criminal allegations rather than convictionsͶcalling into question the utility of reporting on criminal cases prematurely. Criminal allegations are necessarily speculative and uncertain, and covering them requires reliance on the narratives of law enforcement and prosecutors, sources incentivized to insinuate guilt. Further, the strict coverage of arrests (versus actual case outcomes) results in a distorted and therefore misleading portrayal of crime and the criminal legal system. 

Austin: TEXAS CENTER FOR JUSTICE AND EQUITY, 2022. 29p.