Crime & the Media

Media representation of crime

• Over-represents violent & sexual crime
• Exaggerates police success
• Exaggerates the risk of victimisation
• Overplays extraordinary crimes

News Values & Crime Coverage

• Immediacy
• Dramatisation
• Personalisation
• High-status persons
• Simplification
• Novelty or unexpectedness
• Risk
• Violence

Fictional Representations of Crime

• Property crime is under-represented, while violence, drugs & sex crimes are over-represented
• Fictional sex crimes are committed by strangers rather than acquaintances
• Fictional police are usually successful

Recent Trends

• Reality shows tend to feature non-white underclass offenders
• There is an increasing tendency to show police as corrupt & less successful
• Victims have become more central

How the Media Causes Crime & Deviance

• Imitation
• Arousal
• Desensitisation
• Transmitting Knowledge
• Stimulating Desires
• Glamourising crime

• Schesinger & Tumber: Tabloid readers & heavy users of TV had a greater fear of crime
• Lea & Young: The media increase relative deprivation among marginalised groups by transmitting images of a materialistic "good life" as the goal to which they should strive

• The media identify a group of people as a folk devil
• The media negatively stereotype the group & exaggerate the problem
• The authorities condemn the behaviour of the group, leading to calls for a "crackdown"
• This leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy, amplifying the problem
• As more deviants are identified, calls for tougher action lead to a deviance amplification spiral

The Mods & Rockers - Three elements of media overreaction

• Exaggeration & distortion
• Prediction
• Symbolisation

The deviance amplification spiral

• By making it appear that the problem was getting out of hand
• By defining the two groups & emphasising their supposed differences

• Functionalists: Moral panics are a reaction to normlessness
• Marxists: Moral panics help to distract from capitalism