Like I said in your previous question, the major reason for the media's fascination with crime is the fact that it makes for good TV (and print, to some extent). Crime stories are simple -- they have good guys and bad guys, they have drama, they have emotion, someone wins, someone loses. They tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. All of this makes it easy for people to understand them and be caught up in them.
Outside of that, the main factor I can see "mediating" this relationship is the fact that people who commit crimes are generally very different from those who report on them. They tend to be poorer, less educated, and are more often non-white. This helps make it so that reporting on crime is stereotyped because the reporters don't have a good understanding of the people involved.
However, the money aspect is the more important of these, in my opinion. The most culturally sensitive reporter is still going to be pushed by the business demands of the industry to portray crime in certain ways that will appeal to the average viewer.
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