Crime And The Media Flashcards
Give 5 examples of the way in which the media give a distorted picture of crime?
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
How have patterns in the type of crimes reported in the media changed?
Reporting had progressed from focussing on murders and petty crimes to focussing on drugs, child abuse, terrorism, football hooliganism, mugging and sex crimes
What does the distorted picture of crime painted by the news media reflect?
The idea that news is a social construction
What do Stan Cohen and Jock Young note about the news?
They note that it is not discovered but manufactured
What is the manufacture of the news guided by?
News values
What are news values?
The criteria by which journalists and editors decide whether a story is newsworthy enough to make it into the newspaper or news bulletin
What are some of the key news values influencing the selection of crime stories?
Dramatisation, Personalisation, Higher-status, Risk and violence
What are fictional representations of crime?
Representations on tv, cinema and in novels
What are some of the key features of fictional representations of crime?
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
In what ways can the media be seen to cause crime and deviance?
By providing deviant role models, desensitising people to violence, transmitting knowledge of criminal techniques, stimulating demand for unaffordable goods (advertising) and by glamourising offending
In the USA, what did Gerbner find about heavy users of tv?
He found that they had higher levels of fear of crime
What does Richard sparks note about research on the effects of the media?
It ignores the meanings that viewers give to media violence as different people may give very different meanings to violence in cartoons for example
What do left realists such as Lea and Young argue about the effect of the media on crime?
They argue that it increases people’s sense of relative deprivation
How does the media increase people’s sense of relative deprivation?
It presents everyone with images of a materialistic ‘good life’ of leisure, fun and consumer goods
How else can the media be seen to cause further crime and deviance?
Through labelling
What is a moral panic?
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
In a moral panic, what does the media tend to do?
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
What does the moral panic lead to?
A crackdown on the group and possibly a self-fulfilling prophecy
What is the most influential study of moral panics and the role of the media?
Stanley Cohens study of of the mods and rockers
What three things did the media do to create a deviancy amplification spiral?
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
According to Cohen, what results in a moral panic?
A boundary crisis, where there is uncertainty about where the boundary lies between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in a time of change
What does Yvonne Jewkes note about the arrival of the Internet?
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
What are the four categories of cybercrime?
Cyber-deception and theft, Cyber-pornography, Cyber-violence and Cyber-trespass
What percentage of news space do British newspapers devote to crime according to Williams and Dickinson?
30%
