Crime and the media

Question 1

What are the 6 ways that media gives a distorted image of crime, criminals and policing?

Answer 1

1. The media over represents violent and sexual crime
2. The media portray criminals and victims as older and more MC - Felson calls this the ‘age fallacy’
3. Media coverage exaggerates police success - want to represent them in good light so they over represent violent crime due to the higher clear up rates
4. The media exaggerates the risk of victimisation
5. Crime is reported as a series of separate events
6. The media overplay extraordinary crime - Felson calls this the ‘dramatic fallacy’

Question 2

What did Ditton and Duffy find in media representations of violent and sexual crimes?

Answer 2

46% of media reports were about violent or sexual crimes yet these made up only 3% of all crimes recorded by the police

Question 3

What did Schlesinger and Tumber find in changes of crime by the news media?

Answer 3

In the 1960s the focus has been on murderers and petty crimes but by the 1990s they were of less interest to the media
- The abolition of the death penalty and rising crime rates were reasons for these changes

Question 4

What evidence is there of increasing preoccupation with sex crimes?

Answer 4

• Soothill and Walby found that newspaper reporting of rape cases increased from under 1/4 of all cases to over a third
• They also note that coverage consistently focuses on identifying a ‘sex-fiend’ or ‘beast’ often by use of labels or that they are only by psychopaths

Question 5

What does Cohen and Young say on news coverage?

Answer 5

• News is not discovered but manufactured
• News is a social construction as it is the outcome of a social process in which some potential stories are selected while others are rejected

Question 6

Describe what ‘news values’ are and why they are important in manufacturing news.

Answer 6

News values are the criteria by which journalists and editors decide whether a news is newsworthy

Question 7

What are 3 news values influencing the selection of crime stories?

Answer 7

1. Novelty or unexpectedness - a new angle
2. Higher-status
3. Immediacy - ‘breaking news’

Question 8

According to Mandel from 1945-1984 how many fictional thrillers of crime were sold worldwide?

Answer 8

10 billion

Question 9

Surette calls fictional representations of crimes as ‘laws of the opposites’, (opposite to official statistics and similar to news coverage) what are 4 examples of this?

Answer 9

1. Property crime is under represented while violence is over represented
2. While real life homicides mainly result from brawls and domestic disputes, fictional ones are the product of greed and calculation
3. Fictional sex crimes are committed by psychopathic strangers
4. Fictional cops usually get their man

Question 10

What are 3 growing trends of fictional representations of crime?

Answer 10

1. Featuring young, non-white underclass offenders
2. Tendency to show police as corrupt
3. Victims have become more central

Question 11

In the 1920s and 1950s what contributed to the how did media influence crime?

Answer 11

1920s - cinemas were blamed for corrupting youth
1950s - horror comics were held responsible for moral decline

Question 12

What are 5 ways in which the media might possibly cause crime and deviance?

Answer 12

1. Imitation - by providing deviant role models
2. Arousal
3. Desensitisation
4. Transmitting knowledge of criminal techniques
5. Glamourising the offending

Question 13

How does Livingstone criticise the effects of media on children?

Answer 13

• People continue to be preoccupied with the effects of media on children
• Due to our desire as a society to regard childhood as a time of uncontaminated innocence

Question 14

How does Gerbner et al provide evidence that there is a link between media use and the fear of crime?

Answer 14

Heavy users of TV had higher levels of fear of crime

Question 15

How does media cause relative deprivation and crime?

Answer 15

• Media access stimulates the sense of relative deprivation and social exclusion
• As Merton argues, pressure to conform to the norm can cause deviant behaviour

Question 16

What do cultural criminologists argue about media and crime?

Answer 16

• Media turn crime itself into the
  commodity that people desire
• Rather than producing crime in the audience, the media encourages them to consume crime

Question 17

What do critical criminologists Hayward and Young say on media and crime?

Answer 17

• See late modern society as a media saturated society
• In this world there is a blurring between the image and the reality of crime

Question 18

What 3 features does late modernity emphasis on?

Answer 18

• Consumption
• Immediacy
• Excitement

Question 19

What is an example of crime and its thrills becoming commodified by Hayward and Young?

Answer 19

Corporations and advertisers use media images of crime to sell products, especially in the youth market
- Hiphop combines the images of street hustler criminality with images of consumerist success

Question 20

How are counter-cultures sold and packaged?

Answer 20

• Graffiti is the marker of deviant urban cool
• Corporations use it as a technique called ‘brandalism’

Question 21

What happens when identifying moral panics?

Answer 21

1. The media identifies a group as a folk devil or threat to societal values
2. The media present a group in a negative way and exaggerate the scale of the problem
3. Moral entrepreneurs condemn the group and its behaviour which usually leads to a crackdown

Question 22

How can the mods and rockers be differentiated from one another?

Answer 22

• The rockers were bikers who wore black leather jackets and other motorcycle-related attire
• The Mods rode scooters and dressed in suits and neat clothing

Question 23

Cohen uses the analogy of a disaster, where the media produce an inventory of what happened, what 3 elements did this inventory contain?

Answer 23

1. Exaggeration and distortion
2. Prediction
3. Symbolisation

Question 24

How can moral panics lead to a deviance amplification spiral?

Answer 24

• Dramatisation of events made it seem the problem was getting out of hand
• This lead to an increase in response and control from police and courts
• This produced further marginalisation and stigmatisation

Question 25

How does Cohen put the moral panic about the mods and rockers into the wider context of change in post-war British society?

Answer 25

• This was a period of newfound affluence of consumerism and hedonism of the young challenging the values of the older generations
• Moral panics often occur at times of social change, a result of boundary crisis

Question 26

What is the functionalist perspective on the moral panic?

Answer 26

• Can be seen as a way of responding to the sense of anomie-
• By dramatising the threat to society in the form of a folk devil, the media raises collective consciousness and reasserts social controls

Question 27

What are 3 criticisms of the idea of moral panics?

Answer 27

1. Assumes that the societal reaction is a disproportionate over-reaction (fear of crime is rational)
2. What turns the ‘amplifier’ on and off?
3. McRobbie and Thornton says moral panics are now routine

Question 28

What 4 categories of cyber-crime does Wall identify?

Answer 28

1. Cyber-trespass, crossing boundaries into others’ cyber property
2. Cyber-deception and theft, identity theft ‘phishing’
3. Cyber-violence, doing psychological harm or inciting physical harm
4. Global cyber-crime