Crime & The Media

Crime & The Media from the Crime & Deviance topic of AQA A level Sociology

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Media representations of crime

Crime makes up a large proportion of news coverage with British newspapers devoting up to 30% of their news space to crime. The media however give a distorted image of crime. As compared with the picture of crime we gain from the official statistics:

  • The media over-represent violent and sexual crime - 46% of media reports were about violent or sexual crimes yet these made up only 3% of all crimes recorded by the police
  • The media portray criminals and victims as older and more middle class - those in the criminal justice system are younger, known as the 'age fallacy'
  • Media coverage exaggerates police success in clearing up cases because they want to present them in a good light and because the media over-represents violent crime which has a higher clear up
  • The media exaggerate the risk of victimisation especially to older people and women
  • Crime is reported as a series of separate events without looking at causes
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Media representations of crime

  • The media overplay extraordinary crimes such as murder and underplay ordinary crimes

There is some evidence of changes in the type of coverage of crime by the news media. In the 1960s focus was on murders and petty crime but by the 1990s the focus was on child abuse, terrorism. There is also increasing preoccupation with sex crimes with a distorted picture of **** as one of serial attacks carried out by pyschopathic stangers

News values & crime coverage

News is the outcome of a social process in which some potential stories are selected while others are rejected. Cohen & Young notes that news is not discovered but manufactured. News values are the criteria by which journalists decide whether a story is newsworthy enough to make it to the news

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Media representations of crime

Key news values influencing the selection of crime stories include:

  • Immediacy - breaking news
  • Dramatisation - action and excitement
  • Personalisation - human interest stories about individuals
  • Higher status - persons and celebrities
  • Novelty or unexpectedness - a new angle
  • Violence - visible and spectacular acts

Fictional representations of crime

Over 10 billion crime thrillers were sold worldwide between 1945 and 1984 while about 20% of films are crime related. Fictional representations of crime are the opposite of official statistics; property crime is under-represented, fictional cops get their man, fictional sex crimes are committed by strangers. However, now there is a tendency to show police as corrupt and victims as more central

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The media as a cause of crime

In the 1920s and 30s cinema was blamed for corrupting youth; in the 1950s horror comics were held responsible for moral decline and more recently rap lyrics and computer games have been criticised for encouraging criminality

There are numerous ways in which the media might cause crime:

  • Imitation - provides deviant role models which results in copycat behaviour such as the murderers of James Bulger who had watched Child's Play beforehand
  • Arousal - viewing violent/sexual imagery can cause people to commit crimes such as ****, it is illegal to view violent ***********
  • Desensitisation - repeated viewing of violence causes an acceptance of violence in real life, like the film the Human Centipede
  • Transmitting knowledge - the portrayal of crimes can transmit knowledge on how to commit certain crimes such as Breaking Bad with drugs
  • Target of crime - media devices are now a target of crime due to their compact size and the big cultural desire for expensive goods
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The media as a cause of crime

  • Stimulating desire - the advertisement of expensive goods such as perfume stimulates desire for unaffordable items so this leads to utilitarian crime
  • Portraying police as incompetent - if the police are seen as incompetent and idiotic it makes people feel they can get away with it so crimes appeal
  • Glamourising offending - video games such as Grand Theft Auto normalise criminal activity and make it seem more acceptable and enjoyable

However, exposure to media violence has at most a small and limited negative effect on audiences and people are only preoccupied with the effects of media on children because of our desire to regard childhood as a special innocent time

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The media as a cause of crime

Fear of crime

The media also exaggerate the risks of certain groups of people becoming its victim such as young women and old people. There is concern that the media may be distorting the public's impression of crime and causing an unrealistic fear of crime. Those who watch more than 4 hours of TV a day had higher levels of fear of crime. However, this doesn't prove that the media made people scared as people could already be afraid and they watch TV more because they stay in more

The media, relative deprivation & crime

Left realists argue that the mass media help to increase the sense of relative deprivation among poor groups. The mass media have created a standardised image of lifestyle which marginalised groups cannot afford. Merton argues that pressure to conform to the norm can cause deviant behaviour when the opportunity to achieve by legitimate means is blocked

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The media as a cause of crime

Cultural criminology, the media & crime

Cultural criminology argues that the media turn crime itself into the commodity that people desire. Rather than simply producing crime in their audiences, the media encourage them to consume crime, in the form of images of crime. Young sees late modern society as media saturated, where we are immersed in the mediascape, an ever expanding tangle of fluid digital images, including images of crime, so that the two are no longer clearly distinct. For example, police car cameras don't just record police activity but they alter the way in which the police work

A further feature of late modernity is the commodification of crime. Advertisers use media images of crime to sell products such as gangster rap combines images of street criminality. Crime therefore becomes a style to be consumed and this is also true of mainstream products with car ads featuring street riots. Designer labels now function as symbols of deviance such as Bluewater shopping centre banning people from wearing Nike hoodies

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Moral panics

In a moral panic the media identify a group as a folk devil and a threat to society's values, the media present the group in a negative stereotypical way and exaggerate the scale of the problem and moral entrepreneurs such as politicians condemn the group. This can then create a self fulfilling prophecy that amplifies the very problem that caused the panic in the first place. 

Mods and rockers

In Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Cohen examines the media's response to the clashes between the teenage mods and rockers in the 1960s which created a moral panic. The initial confrontations in Clacton were minor scuffles yet the media over reacted. The media produced an inventory of what happened:

Exaggeration and distortion - The media exaggerated the numbers involved and the extent of the violence through dramatic headlines like 'Day of Terror'

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Moral panics

Prediction - The media regularly assumed and predicted further conflict and violence would result

Symbolisation - The symbols of the mods and rockers such as their clothes were all negatively labelled and associated with deviance

The media's portrayal of events produced a deviance amplification spiral by making it seem as if the problem was spreading and getting out of hand. This led to increased police control and further marginalisation and so on in an upward spiral. By emphasising their clothing differences too encouraged polarisation and created a self fulfilling prophecy of escalating conflict. People have to rely on the media for information so people believed the media's portrayal of them

The mods and rockers moral panic is put into the wider context of change found in post war British society where youth challenged old values by drinking, having sex and creating a new youth identity

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Moral panics

Moral panics occur at times of social change and as a result of a boundary crisis, where there was uncertainty about where the boundary lay between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in a time of change. Functionalists say that moral panics can be seen as ways of responding to the sense of anomie created by change. By dramatising the threat to society in the form of a folk devil the media raises collective consciousness when values are threatened. Neo-Marxists also use moral panics with the rise of the black mugger

Criticisms of the idea of moral panics

  • It assumes that the societal reaction is a disproportionate over-reaction but what tells us what is disproportionate and what is just panicky?
  • Do today's media audiences who are accustomed to shock stories really react with panic to media exaggerations? There is also less consensus about what is deviant in late modernity as lifestyle choices such as premarital sex are no longer regarded as deviant 
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Moral panics

Cyber crime

The arrival of the internet has led to fears of cyber crime, which Thomas & Loader define as computer meditated activities that are either illegal or considered illicit, and that are conducted through global electronic networks. There are four categories of cybercrime:

  • Cyber-trespass - crossing boundaries into others' cyber property such as hacking and spreading viruses like the 2017 NHS hack
  • Cyber-deception and theft - including identity theft, phishing and software piracy
  • Cyber-p*rnography - including p*rn involving minors
  • Cyber-violence - doing psychological harm such as cyber stalking and bullying

Policing cyber crime is difficult because of the sheer scale of the internet and the limited resources of the police. However, IT provides the police with greater opportunities for surveillance such as CCTV cameras, digital fingerprinting and monitoring email traffic

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