Crime And The Media

Question 1

Give 5 examples of the way in which the media give a distorted picture of crime?

Answer 1

The media over-represents violent and sexual crime, It portrays criminals and victims as older and more middle-class, it exaggerates police success, it exaggerates the risk of victimisation and it overplays extraordinary crimes

Question 2

How have patterns in the type of crimes reported in the media changed?

Answer 2

Reporting had progressed from focussing on murders and petty crimes to focussing on drugs, child abuse, terrorism, football hooliganism, mugging and sex crimes

Question 3

What does the distorted picture of crime painted by the news media reflect?

Answer 3

The idea that news is a social construction

Question 4

What do Stan Cohen and Jock Young note about the news?

Answer 4

They note that it is not discovered but manufactured

Question 5

What is the manufacture of the news guided by?

Answer 5

News values

Question 6

What are news values?

Answer 6

The criteria by which journalists and editors decide whether a story is newsworthy enough to make it into the newspaper or news bulletin

Question 7

What are some of the key news values influencing the selection of crime stories?

Answer 7

Dramatisation, Personalisation, Higher-status, Risk and violence

Question 8

What are fictional representations of crime?

Answer 8

Representations on tv, cinema and in novels

Question 9

What are some of the key features of fictional representations of crime?

Answer 9

Property crime is under represented, while violence, drugs and sex crimes are exaggerated. Sex crimes are committed by psychopathic strangers rather than acquaintances and fictional cops usually get their man

Question 10

In what ways can the media be seen to cause crime and deviance?

Answer 10

By providing deviant role models, desensitising people to violence, transmitting knowledge of criminal techniques, stimulating demand for unaffordable goods (advertising) and by glamourising offending

Question 11

In the USA, what did Gerbner find about heavy users of tv?

Answer 11

He found that they had higher levels of fear of crime

Question 12

What does Richard sparks note about research on the effects of the media?

Answer 12

It ignores the meanings that viewers give to media violence as different people may give very different meanings to violence in cartoons for example

Question 13

What do left realists such as Lea and Young argue about the effect of the media on crime?

Answer 13

They argue that it increases people’s sense of relative deprivation

Question 14

How does the media increase people’s sense of relative deprivation?

Answer 14

It presents everyone with images of a materialistic ‘good life’ of leisure, fun and consumer goods

Question 15

How else can the media be seen to cause further crime and deviance?

Answer 15

Through labelling

Question 16

What is a moral panic?

Answer 16

An exaggerated over-reaction by society to a perceived problem - usually driven by the media - where the reaction enlarges the problem out of all proportion to its real seriousness

Question 17

In a moral panic, what does the media tend to do?

Answer 17

Identify a group as a folk devil, present the group in a negative way and moral entrepreneurs and other respectable people condemn the group and its behaviour

Question 18

What does the moral panic lead to?

Answer 18

A crackdown on the group and possibly a self-fulfilling prophecy

Question 19

What is the most influential study of moral panics and the role of the media?

Answer 19

Stanley Cohens study of of the mods and rockers

Question 20

What three things did the media do to create a deviancy amplification spiral?

Answer 20

They exaggerated and distorted the numbers involved in the violence, They predicted further conflict and violence and their symbolisation and labelling of the mods and rockers

Question 21

According to Cohen, what results in a moral panic?

Answer 21

A boundary crisis, where there is uncertainty about where the boundary lies between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in a time of change

Question 22

What does Yvonne Jewkes note about the arrival of the Internet?

Answer 22

He argues that it creates opportunities to commit both ‘conventional crimes’ such as fraud and new crimes using using new tools such as software piracy

Question 23

What are the four categories of cybercrime?

Answer 23

Cyber-deception and theft, Cyber-pornography, Cyber-violence and Cyber-trespass

Question 24

What percentage of news space do British newspapers devote to crime according to Williams and Dickinson?

Answer 24

30%