Crime and the Media

Richard et al's (1991) study of Toronto - 45-71% of quality press and radio news was about various forms of deviance and its control

Williams and Dickinson (1993) found that British newspapers devote up to 30% of their news space to crime 

How the media gives a distorted image of crime, criminals and policing:
Over-representations of violent and sexual crime 

Ditton and Duffy (1983) found that 46% of media reports were about violent or seuxal crimes, yet they only made up 3% of all crimes recorded by the police

Portrays criminals and victims as older and more middle-class
Felson (1998) calls this the 'age fallacy'

Exaggerates police success

Exaggerates the risk of victimisation

Crime is reported as a series of seperate events

Overplays extraordinary crimes and underplays ordinary crimes
Felson (1998) calls this the 'dramatic fallacy'

Distorted picture of crime painted by the news media reflects the fact that news is a social construction 

Stan Cohen and Jock Young (1973) - news is not discovered, but manufactured 

'News values' - the criteria by which journalists and editors decide whether a story is newsworthy

Key news values:

• Immediacy - 'breaking news' 
• Dramatisation - action and excitement
• Personalisation - human interest stories about people
• Higher-status persons/celebrities
• Simplificiation - elimiating shades of grey
• Novelty or unexpectedness - a new angle
• Risk - victim-centred stories about vunerability and fear
• Violence - especially visible and spectacular acts

Fictional representations from TV, cinema and novels - important sources of knowledge of crime

Ernest Mandel (1984) - estimates that from 1945-1984, over 10 billion crime thrillers were sold worldwide, while about 25% of prime time TV and 20% of films were about crime shows or movies

Surette (1998) 'Law of Opposites'- fictional representations of crime, criminals and victims are opposite to official statistics:

• Property crime is under-represented - violence, drugs and sex crimes are over-represented
• Real-life homicides mainly result from brawls and domestic disputes - fictional homicides are the result of greed and calculation
• Fictional sex crimes are committed by psychopahic strangers
• Fictional villains tend to be higher status, middle-aged white men
• Fictional police usually catch their suspect

Recent Trends:

• 'Reality' infotainment - features young, non-white 'underclass' offenders
• Increasing tendency to show police as corrupt and brutal
• Victims have become more central - law enforcers portrayed as their avengers

Ways the media can encourage crime and deviance:

• Imitation - by providing deviant role models
• Arousal
• Desensitisation
• By transmitting knowledge of criminal techniques
• As a target for crime
• By stimulating desires for unaffordable goods
• By portraying the police as incompetent
• By glamourising offending

Exposure to violence has a small and limited negative effect on audiences

Sonia Livingstone (1996) - people to continue to be preoccupied with the effects of the media on children because of our desire as a society to regard childhood as a time of uncontaminated innocence in the private sphere 

Media distorts the public's impression of crime - causes an unrealistic fear of crime

Gerbner et al - found that heavy users of television (4+ hours a day) had higher levels of fear of crime

Schlesinger and Tumber (1992) - found correlations between media consumption and fear of crime, with tabloid readers and heavy users of TV expressing greater fear of becoming a victim, especially of physical attack or mugging

Greer and Reiner (2012) - 'effects' research on the media as a cause of crime/fear of crime ignores the meanings that viewers give to media violence