Crime and Deviance - Crime in the media (relevant to media) Flashcards
Examples of crime in the media
- Crimewatch
- Criminal minds
- Line of Duty
- Silent Witness
- Chicago PD
- Hawaii Five-O
- Anatomy of a scandal
- In the line of duty
- Cluedo
- CSI
- Grand Theft Auto
- Midsummer Murders
- Can’t pay we’ll take it away
- NCIS
- True Crime podcasts
- Unsolved mysteries
Crime has become infotainment (Postman)
- A mixture of fact and reality or real world crime inspiring fictional media; thrillers, murder mystery, real life cold cases, exposes on criminal masterminds
- Kidd-Hewitt and Osbourne (1995) recognise crime is a spectacle
Definitions of crime and the media
- Moral Panic - when the public are made to think that something is a growing problem when it isn’t really, but the panic that happens because the media has created it causes the issue to happen
- Folk Devil - When individuals in the media are created to be a mythological threat that people should fear
- Deviancy amplification - The original deviant act is blown out of proportion by the media and it causes further deviant reactions due to labelling
- Content analysis - A research method as a way to analyse themes or trends in the news related to crime through counting and measuring
- Pluralist view - Positive view of the media - democratic and varied media
- Social learning - Bandura; people learn by observing others
- News values - Guidelines to determine the prominence of each story
Theoretical perspectives on crime and media
- Marxism - ideological state apparatus
- Interpretivism - focuses on the social construction of the media
- Feminism - cause of violence against women
- Functionalists and pluralists - media just reflects what is happening society
- Postmodernism - media informs our view of crime
Representation in the media
- Majority of the public base their knowledge of crime on the media, which includes fictional crime, rather than their own direct experience, and media highlights what was otherwise unknown
- Surette (2010) - there is a ‘backwards law’ or ‘law of opposites’ where the media constructs a picture which is an opposite view of reality; they over report crimes which are rare, for example
Greer and Rainer (2012) - examples of this:
1) Sex and drug related crime is over represented (property crime is most common)
2) Crime as serious and violent (most crime is low level, non-dramatic, trivial and typically involves no loss or serious damage or injury)
3) Police effectiveness is over exaggerated (police are not always successful)
4) Over exaggerating risks to high status, white, older people, women and children and their real risks are much lower
5) Media shows crime in isolation and so we never understand patterns or trends
Reiner - Fictional Crime distorts our views
- Crime excites the imagination - media seeks out newsworthy crime stories which will excite and captivate us; they use news values to select what will boost audiences/readers.
- Reiner says our understanding of crime is filtered through these news values and therefore we have a misunderstanding of the reality of crime, only being exposed to what the media corporations choose for us to see.
- Violent crime, sexual crime and terrorist crime are all over represented - they are more interesting and attract more interest.
Jewkes -
- Jewkes - Created alternate news values to Galtung and Ruge;
1) Threshold
2) Proximity
3) Predictability
4) Individualism
5) Simplification
6) Risk
7) Spectacle and graphic images
8) Celebrity or high-status people
9) Children
10) Sex
11) Violence
12) Conservatism
Hyperreality of crime
- Crime is socially constructed in the media, as they set the agenda of what is important (e.g. knife crime) and they use news values to select what we see along with distorting the picture of what is actually happening
- This distorts our fear of becoming a victim, alters our understanding of what patterns of crime do exist and increases our concern over crime in our society
Baudrillard’s concept of ‘hyperreality’ - media does not reflect reality, it creates a new one, such as crime falling steadily between 1995 and 2010 but nearly ¾ of the population wrongly feeling it was rising due to the media - The New Media makes hyperreality more likely because individuals have more of a blurred line between reality and fiction - global streaming and churnalism and small and important details are lost and fake news spreads more easily
- You expect dramatised versions and crime is romanticised
- Example 1 - The ‘psycho-stranger’ - media shows crime carried out by a psychotic stranger, but in reality you are more likely to be harmed by those that you know e.g. A woman who stabbed a child to death on Mother’s Day whilst riding her scooter (The Sun in 2020) but alternatively, a different story with more commodity about the scandal of 63 children being killed by parents after officials missed warning signs (distortion of perpetrator)
- Example 2 - elderly people - media can be selective in focusing upon some victims more than others, such as old people being attacked by strangers in their home often becoming front page news - but ‘elderly abuse’ (abuse by carers old people live with) is estimated by Age Concern to affect 500,000 old people in the UK but is largely ignored
- Example 3 - ethnicity and crime - the media plays up the image of black offenders, muggers and criminality generally; however, it reports less the fact that the evidence from official statistics suggests that African-Caribbeans and South Asians are twice as likely to be a victim of crime as the majority White population
How has social media impacted the picture of crime?
- Social media has both exacerbated our fear of crime and also allowed people to protect each other and more immediate reporting
Media as a cause of crime - criminogenic
Greer and Reiner - hypodermic syringe model (drip feed of media to create a narrative) and in the media sometimes there is too much opportunity to post, an absence of controls, there are means provided as people learn how to commit crimes through news and there are motives provided to copy crime due to vicarious reinforcement
7 ways in which the media can ‘commit crime’
1) Imitation - deviant role models and the cause of copycat crimes; people are inspired through the media for the reward of the crime
2) Arousal - viewing violent or sexual imagery and then seeking to reproduce this
3) Desensitisation - Repeated viewing of violence makes people less bothered about it, and so the media then has to find more explicit and violent media to make people feel interested again
4) Knowledge of criminal techniques - passing on knowledge; media becomes a school of crime
5) Criminogenic nature or society / strain theory - advertising stimulates desire for unaffordable goods
6) Poor capable guardians - portrayal of the police incompetence - e.g. Stephen Lawrence
7) Glamourising offending - groups like the Great Train Robbers, netflix shows such as Money Heist suggesting it is for a cause
Moral Panics in media and crime
- The media exaggerates the extent of violent and personal crime
- Reiner conducted content analysis of crime reporting in UK press and found that all of the crime reported in the media - 75% was personal crime and 25% was property crime - in reality, the proportions are the inverse, 30% of all crime is reported as homicide, despite this making up less than 1% of crimes
- The media exaggerates the extent of youth crime and deviance and it also over-represents working class street crime rather than middle class and corporate crime
- Analysis of crime and deviance in the news and documentaries tend to be very simplistic
The process of causing a moral panic -
1) The crime is committed as defined by social control agencies
2) Application of news values to the story
3) Crime as news - selective portrayal in the media
4) Deviancy amplification - targeting of news, public concern and crime control agencies on particular aspects of deviance, due to perceived and real increases in deviance
5) Moral panic - law and order campaign
6) Public definition of crime - consequences of selective knowledge about crime, fear, less tolerance and calls for a crackdown
Examples of moral panics
- Mods & Rockers (1960s) (Cohen)
- Mugging in the 1970s (Hall et al).
- HIV/Aids (1980s).
- Satanic child abuse (1980s).
- Heroin and crack cocaine distribution (1980s/1990s).
- Video-nasties (1980/1990s).
- Guns (1990s and 2000s)
- Acid raves, Ecstasy, (1990s) (Thornton and Critcher).
- Asylum seekers (2000s).
- Islamic terrorism (2000s)
- Knife crime (2000s)
Evaluating moral panics - Thornton and McRobbie
Frequency
- The frequency of moral panics has increased: they are no longer noteworthy.
Context
- In the past moral panics would scapegoat a group and create ‘folk devils’. Today there are many viewpoints and values in society.
Reflexivity
- Because the concept of moral panic is well-known, some groups actually try to create one for their own benefit.
Difficulty
- Because there is less certainty about what is unambiguously ‘bad’ today, moral panics are harder to start.
Rebound
- People are wary about starting moral panics as there is the possibility of it rebounding on them, e.g. John Major’s ‘family values’ campaign.
Fictional representations of crime
Fictional criminals/crime as:
- Easily identifiable as bad/deviant
- Nearly always get their come-uppance
- Stupid / psychopaths / Bumbling idiots
- Vigilante
- Male
- Terror / large scale crime
Fictional law enforcers as:
- Nearly always victorious
- Super sleuths
- Intelligent
- Maverick but likeable
- Protectors
- Male (more often than not!)
Fictional victims
- Helpless female is ‘victim’
- Blameless
- Rich - assets stolen
- Get justice eventually (there is a resolution)
- Get closure (happy ending)
- Ethnic majority
- Older
Factual representation of crime
Factual criminals/crime as:
- Ethnic minority
- Young
- Men
- Underclass
- Driving / drug /assault offences
Factual law enforcers:
- Corrupt
- Brutality
- Held to account over their behaviour (inquiries)
- Ethnic majority
- Fallable
- Missing white woman syndrome
Factual victims:
- Ethnic minorities
- Young
- Male
- Working class
- Without justice on occasion
- Real harm - long lasting effects
