You know the saying: "If it bleeds, it leads." But in a world where grabby headlines increasingly dominate all types of news media, that kind of philosophy can actually mislead. So it pays to ask: is there a correlation between those headlines and what the police are actually discovering -- or are the newspapers reporting crime in a way that attracts the most attention? To answer that question, we went out and studied one week of crime coverage from four papers in four major U.S. cities. We then looked at police crime reports in those cities over the same period. Depending on where you go for your news, the results may surprise you. Crime news reports are dominated by murders, stabbings, shootings and assaults. Murder accounts for less than 1% of crimes committed -- yet it receives around 20% to 30% of the crime related coverage in the newspapers that we analyzed. Even in Oakland, CA --the most accurate city we studied -- murders made up .8% of overall crime, but were awarded 62% of...(Read Full Post)