Crime and Deviance: Crime and the Media: Flashcards
How and why does the media employ agenda setting?
- The media manages and select what crimes are presents and highlighted.
- This leads to a public opinion forming that may or may not be accurate.
- This then shapes society’s response e.g. inflation government policy.
What is agenda setting?
When journalists filter what they consider to be newsworthy and this dominates the media portrayal of crime.
What is the backwards law? Who developed the term?
The media provides an opposite or backwards version of reality and changed public perception of crime, Surrette.
What are the 5 ways Green and Reiner argue the media create backwards law?
- By hugely over presenting and exaggerating sex, drug and serious violence related crimes and by under-representing the risks of the most common offence of property crime.
- By portraying property crime as far more serious and violent than most recorded effects.
- By over exaggerating police effectiveness in cleaning up crime.
- By exaggerating the risks of becoming victims faced by higher status white people, older people, women and children.
- By emphasizing individual incidents of crime, rather than providing any understanding or analysis of crime patterns or the causes of crime.
Define what a moral entrepreneur is:
A moral entrepreneur is an individual, group or formal organization that seeks to influence a group to adopt or maintain a norm.
Who were the mods and rockers (Cohen)?
Conflicting youth subcultures in 1960’s Britain, made up of young working class men.
What was the role of the media in portraying the mods and rockers (Cohen)?
To show them as juvenile delinquents, to be feared. They exaggerated the events in order to create a moral panic.
What effect did this have on public opinion of the mods and rockers (Cohen)?
It alienated the mods and rockers away from each other and wider society (e.g. some called for the death penalty against them for their low level crime), this maintained the social hierarchy and maintained the social power of the bourgeoisie.
Define folk devil:
Individuals or groups posing an imagined or exaggerated threat to society.
Define deviance amplification:
The way the media may actually make things worse or create the very deviance they condemn by their exaggerated, sensationalism and distorted reporting of events and their presence of them.
What did McRobbie and Thornton suggest about moral panics?
They are outdated in the age of new media. New media tech, media saturation, intense competition between outlets has changed the reaction to and reporting of evets. This makes audiences more skeptical.
What is Beck’s ‘risk consciousness’ and moral panics?
He argues that globalisation has made us more risk aware and thus the threat moral panics have been neutralised. They have become normal and so are now indistinguishable.
Give another example of an effective moral panic?
Donald Trump used Mexican immigrants as folk devils in order to create a moral panic to explain his infamous “walk” through deviance amplification.
What did Hall et al, 2012, argue about moral panics?
Argued society has reached a new level of ‘exasperation’ over the level of crime and headlines no longer produce a moral panic from the public.
What would postmodernist sociologists argue about moral panics as a concept?
That as society has become more complex, diverse and multicultural the moral panic had become outdated as traditional society doesn’t exist anymore.
