Media and Crime

Media and Crime

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

How the media distorts crime

• Over-representation of violent and sexual crime
  • Ditton & Duffy (1983) found that 46% of media were about sexual/violent crime yet it was only 3% of all crime
    • criticism :
      how do you define sexual / violent?
      not all sexual crimes are reported due to embarrassment, fear, having personal details discussed etc.. so 3% may not be an accurate figure

• Portrays the criminals and victims and more middle class than reality

• Exaggerated police success
  • we always hear about arrests, people being put in jail etc... 
  • it's more of a story to hear about the successfulness of the police (e.g. you don't hear a lot about an ongoing police investigation but when they finally catch the criminals, it's more of a story
  • it takes a while to correctly identify criminals and investigate
    • if police makes a mistake and jail someone innocent, it will ruin their reputation and be labelled as "corrupt"

• exaggerated risk of victimisation
  • make people believe that it's more likely that you're going to be at a risk of crime than you actually are

• crime is reported as a series of separate events
  • in reality there may be links that one person is committing a lot of the crimes or it's one person being victimised a lot
    • e.g. the place you live in, an abusive relationship etc…

• overplay extraordinary events
  • things that are really obscure are reported a LOT and it's everywhere in the…