7. Crime and the media
- Created by: Amy Parkinson
- Created on: 03-05-15 12:14
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- Crime and the media
- Media representations of crime
- The news media give a distorted image of crime, criminals and policing
- The media over-represent violence and sexual crime
- DITTON & DUFFY
- 46% of media reports were about violent or sexual crime yet these made up only 3% of all crimes reported by the police
- DITTON & DUFFY
- The media portray criminals and victims as older and more m/c than those typically found in the CJS
- FELSON
- He calls this the 'age fallacy'
- FELSON
- Media coverage exaggerates police success
- The media exaggerate the risk of victimisation especially to women, white people and higher status individuals
- Crime is reported as a series of separate victims without structure and without examining underlying causes
- The media overplay extraordinary crimes and underplay ordinary crimes
- FELSON
- He calls this the 'dramatic fallacy'
- Similarly the media leads us to believe that to commit crime one must be clever and daring- the 'ingenuity fallacy'
- FELSON
- There have been changes to this type of coverage
- SCHLESINGER & TUMBER
- In the 60s the focus was on murders and petty crime but shifted by the 90s
- SCHLESINGER & TUMBER
- There is also increasing preoccupation with sexual crimes
- SOOTHILL & WALBY
- Newspaper reporting of **** cases increased from under a quarter of all cases in 1951 to over a third in 1985
- SOOTHILL & WALBY
- News values and crime coverage
- The distorted picture of crime shows how news is a social construction
- COHEN & YOUNG
- News is not discovered, it is manufactured
- News values are the criteria by which journalists decide whether a story is newsworthy
- Key news values:
- Immediacy
- Dramatisation
- Personalisation
- Higher-status
- Simplification
- Novelty or unexpectedness
- Risk
- Violence
- Fictional representations of crime
- We don't just get our images of crime from the news
- TV, cinema and novels also provide us with knowledge of crime
- SURETTE
- Fictional representations of crime follow 'the law of opposites'; they are opposite to the OFs
- Property crime is under-represented, while violence, sex and drugs crimes are over-represented
- Fictional sex crimes are committed by psychopathic strangers rather than the true criminal who tends to be an acquaintance
- Fictional cops usually get their man
- However, recent trends portray cops as corrupt, criminals as young non-white underclass and victims as more central
- The media as a cause of crime
- There is concern that the media may have negative affects on attitudes, values and behaviour
- There numerous ways in which the media might possible cause crime and deviance:
- Imitation; by providing deviant role models resulting in copycat behaviour
- Arousal: through viewing violent or sexual imagery
- Desensitisation: through repeated viewing of violence
- By transmitting knowledge of criminal techniques
- As a target fro crime e.g. theft plasma tvs
- By stimulating desires for unaffordable goods
- By portraying the police as incompetent
- By glamouring offending
- Overall, however, most studies tend to find that exposure to media violence has a small and limited effect on its audience
- Fear of crime
- There is concern that the media create a distorted impression of crime causing unrealistic fear of crime
- GERBNER ET AL
- Heavy users of TV had higher levels of fear of crime
- However, correlations between media consumption and fear of crime does not prove that the media causes fear
- It may be that those who are already afraid of going out at night watch more TV just because they stay in more
- SPARKS
- Much 'media effects' research ignores the meanings that viewers give to media violence
- The media, relative deprivation and crime
- Lab-based research has focused on whether media portrayals of crime and deviant lifestyles lead viewers to commit crime themselves
- An alternative approach is to consider how far media portrayals of normal rather than criminal lifestyles might also encourage people to commit crime
- LEFT REALISTS
- The mass media help to increase the sense of relative deprivation among poor and marginalised social groups
- MERTON
- Individuals may turn to crime as a result of their lack of access to the criminal opportunity structure
- Moral panics
- Another way the media may cause crime is through labelling
- The use of media pressure about certain social groups may lead to a negative label of the group and possible changes in the law
- An important element in this process is the creation of moral panics
- In a moral panic:
- 1. The media identify a group as a folk devil or threat to societal values
- 2. The media present the group in a negative stereotypical fashion and exaggerate the scale of the problem
- 3. Moral entrepreneurspoliticians, police chiefs, bishops and other 'respectable' people condemn the group and its behaviour
- 4. A crackdown is called for, however this may result in a self fulfilling prophecy that amplifies the problem
- Mods and Rockers
- Study by STANLEY COHEN: book called 'folk devils and moral panics'
- Mods wore smart dress and rode scooters; rockers wore leather jackets and rode motorbikes
- The initial confrontation with the two groups was minor yet the media over-reacted
- COHEN says the media produce an inventory of what happened which contained 3 elements:
- Exaggeration and distortion
- Prediction
- Symbolisation
- The media's portrayal of the events produced a deviance amplification spiral
- This spiral lead to increased social control and produced further marginalisation and stigmatisation of the mods and rockers as deviants and theerfore less tolerance
- The media further amplified the deviance by defining the groups and their subculture styles which led to more youths adopting the style
- Media definitions of the situation are crucial in creating a moral panic because most people have no direct contact with the event
- COHEN argues that moral panics often occur at times of social change
- The mods and rockers moral panic was a result of a boundary crisis where there was uncertainty about what was acceptable and unacceptable behaviour
- FUNCTIONALISTS
- In this view, moral panics can be seen as ways of responding to a sense of anomie created by change
- By dramatising the threat to society in the form of a folk devil the media raises the collective consciousness and reasserts social controls when central values are threatened
- STUART ET AL (neo-marxism)
- The moral panic over mugging in the British media in the 70s served to distract attention from the crisis of capitalism, divide the w/c on racial grounds and legitimate a more authoritarian style of rule
- EVAL
- It assumes that societal reaction is a disproportionate over-reaction; but what is proportionate?
- What turns the amplifier on and off; why are the media able to amplify some problems and not others?
- Do today's audiences who are accustomed to shock horror stories really react with panic to media exaggerations?
- Global cyber-crime
- The arrival of new types of media is often met with a moral panic
- The arrival of the internet has led to fears of cyber crime
- WALL's 4 categories of cyber-crime:
- Cyber-trespass (crossing boundaries into other peoples cyber property)
- Cyber-deception and theft (identity theft, 'phishing'...)
- Cyber-*********** (that involving minors and access to children through the Net)
- Cyber-violence (psychological harm or inciting physical harm)
- Policing cyber-crime is hard because of the sheer scale of the internet and its globalised nature
- However, ICT provides the police and the state with greater opportunities for surveillance and control of the population
- Media representations of crime
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