Crime and The Media

Question 1

Briefly outline the three ways in which the media give a distorted image of crime.

Answer 1

• Media over-represent violent and sexual crime: Ditton and Duffy - 46% media reports about violent or sexual crimes, only 3% of all crimes recorded by police.
• Media portray criminals and victims as older and more m/c than those typically found in CJS. Felson: ‘age fallacy’.
• Media exaggerates risk of victimisation, especially to women, white people and higher status individuals.

Question 2

According to Schlesinger and Tumber, how did the portrayal of crime change between the 1960s and the 1990s? What caused this change?

Answer 2

1960s: Focus on murders and petty crime.
1990s: Focus on drugs, child abuse and terrorism.

Change came about because of the abolition of the death penalty for murder. Also rising crime rates meant crime had to be ‘special’ to attract coverage.

Question 3

According to Soothill and Walby, how do the media give a distorted view of sex crimes?

Answer 3

• Newspaper reporting of rape cases increased from under 1/4 of all cases in 1951 to over 1/3 in 1985.
• Distorted picture of rape is one of serial attacks carried out by psychopathic strangers. Exception rather than rule.
• Most cases victim knows rapist.

Question 4

Briefly explain what is meant by news being a social construction.

Answer 4

• Outcome of a social process in which some potential stories are selected while others are rejected.
• S. Cohen and Young: news isn’t discovered but manufactured.

Question 5

Briefly explain how news values are used to manufacture the news.

Answer 5

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

Question 6

Briefly outline some of the key news values.

Answer 6

• Immediacy: ‘Breaking news’
• Dramatisation: Action and excitement
• Personalisation: Human interest stories about individuals
• Higher-status: Persons and ‘celebrities’
• Simplification: eliminating shades of grey
• Novelty or unexpectedness: A new angle
• Risk: Victim-centred stories about vulnerability and fear
• Violence: especially visible and spectacular acts

Question 7

According to Surette, what is meant by the ‘law of opposites’?

Answer 7

The opposite of the official statistics.

Question 8

Give four examples of how fictional representations of crime differ from official statistics.

Answer 8

• Property crime: under-represented. Violence, drugs and sex crimes: over-represented.
• Real-life homicides: mainly result from brawls and disputes. Fictional: product of greed and calculation.
• Fictional sex crimes: committed by psychopathic strangers, not acquaintances. Fictional villains: higher status, middle-ages white males.
• Fictional cops usually get their man.

Question 9

Briefly outline three recent trends in fictional representation of crime.

Answer 9

• New genre of ‘reality’ infotainment shows: young, non-white ‘underclass’ offenders.
• Increasing tendency to show police as corrupt, brutal and less successful.
• Victims: become more central with law enforcers portrayed as their avengers. Audiences invited to identify with their suffering.

Question 10

Briefly outline four ways in which the media might cause crime and deviance.

Answer 10

• Imitation: by providing deviant role models, resulting in ‘copycat’ behaviour.
• Arousal: e.g through viewing violent or sexual imagery.
• Desensitisation: e.g through repeated viewing of violence.
• By transmitting knowledge of criminal techniques.

Question 11

According to Schramm et al, what is the impact on children of exposure to media violence?

Answer 11

For some harmful, others beneficial. For most, neither harmful or beneficial.

Question 12

According to Livingstone, why are people still preoccupied with the effects of the media on children?

Answer 12

Despite such conclusions, people continue to be preoccupied with effects because of desire (society) to regard childhood as a time of uncontaminated innocence in the private sphere.

Question 13

How might media representations of crime affect people’s fear of crime?

Answer 13

Media may be distorting the public’s impression of crime and causing an unrealistic fear of crime.

Question 14

Briefly outline the findings of the following studies on the link between media use and fear of crime:

• Gerbner et al
• Schlesinger and Tumber

Answer 14

Gerbner et al: Heavy users of TV (4+ hrs per day) had higher levels of fear of crime.

Schlesinger and Tumber: Tabloid readers and heavy users of TV express greater fear of becoming a victim, especially physical attack and mugging.

Question 15

According to Greer and Reiner, why should an interpretivist approach be used when investigating the effects of the media?

Answer 15

If we want to understand the possible effects of the media, we must look at the meanings people give to what they see and read.

Question 16

According to left realism, how do the media encourage feeling of relative deprivation?

Answer 16

Lea and Young: “The mass media have disseminated a standardized image of lifestyle, particularly in areas of popular culture and recreation, which, for those unemployed and surviving through the dole queue or only able to obtain employment at very low wages, has accentuated the sense of relative deprivation.”

Question 17

How do the media representations of ‘normal’ life illustrate Merton’s view of the cause of crime?

Answer 17

Pressure to conform to the norm can cause deviant behaviour when the opportunity to achieve by legitimate means is blocked.

Media: Instrumental in setting the norm and thus in promoting crime.

Question 18

According to cultural criminology, how do the media turn crime into a commodity?

Answer 18

Rather than simply producing crime in their audiences, the media encourage them to consume crime, in the form of images of crime.

Question 19

According to Hayward and Young, what is the impact of a media-saturated society on crime? Use an example to explain your answer.

Answer 19

Blurring between the image and the reality of crime, there’s a blurring between image and reality of crime. The way the media represent crime and crime control now actually constitutes or creates the thing itself.

Example: gang assaults not just caught on camera but staged for the camera and packed together in ‘underground fight videos’.

Question 20

Using examples, briefly how corporations and advertisers use the media images of crime to sell products.

Answer 20

• ‘Gangster’ rap and hip hop combine images of street hustler criminality with images of consumerist success.
• Fenwick and Hayward: “crime is packaged and marketed to young people as a romantic, exciting, cool and fashionable cultural symbol.”

Question 21

Using examples, briefly explain what is meant by ‘brandalism’.

Answer 21

• Graffiti: marker of deviant urban cool, but corporations now use it in a ‘guerrilla marketing’ technique (‘brandalism’) to sell everything from theme parks to cars and video games.
• Corporations use moral panics, controversy and scandal to market their products.

Question 22

How are brands used as tools of classification?

Answer 22

• Brands become tools of classification for constructing profiles of potential criminals.
• Designer labels valued by young people as badges of identity now function as symbols of deviance.
• Example: some pubs and clubs refuse entry to individuals wearing certain brands.

Question 23

Briefly explain what is meant by a moral panic.

Answer 23

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

Question 24

Briefly outline the three stages of a moral panic.

Answer 24

• The media identify a group as a folk devil or threat to societal values.
• The media present the group in a negative, stereotypical fashion and exaggerate the scale of the problem.
• Moral entrepreneurs, editors, politicians, police chiefs and other ‘respectable’ people condemn the group and its behaviour.

Question 25

Briefly explain the following groups:

• Mods
• Rockers

Answer 25

• Mods: smart dress, rode scooters, listened to The Who

- Rockers: wore leather jackets and rode motorbikes, listened to Elvis Presley.

Question 26

Briefly outline the following elements of media reporting of the mods and rockers identified by Cohen:

• Exaggeration and distortion
• Prediction
• Symbolism

Answer 26

Exaggeration and distortion:
- Media exaggerated numbers involved, extent of violence and damage, distorted picture through dramatic reporting and sensational headlines (e.g: Youngsters Beat Up Town)

Prediction:
- The media regularly assumed and predicted further conflict and violence would result.

Symbolism:

• Symbols of the mods and rockers were negatively labelled and associated with deviance.
• Medias use of these symbols allowed them to link unconnected events.

Question 27

According to Cohen, how did the media’s portrayal of events create a deviance amplification spiral?

Answer 27

• Media made situation appear to be spreading and out of hand.
• Led to calls for increased control (police and courts).
• Produced further marginalisation and stigmatisation of mods +rockers as deviant, less tolerance of them and so on in upward spiral.

Question 28

In what ways did the media further amplify deviance?

Answer 28

• Defining the two groups + their subcultural styles.
• Led to more youths adopting these styles + drew in more participants for future clashes.
• Emphasising their supposed differences allowed media to crystallise two distinct identities + transformed loose-knit groupings into two tight-knit gangs.
• Encouraged polarisation + helped create self-fulfilling prophecy of escalating conflict as youths acted out role assigned to them by the media.

Question 29

According to Cohen, why are media definitions crucial in a moral panic?

Answer 29

In large-scale modern societies, most people have no direct experience of the events themselves and thus have to rely on the media for information about them.

Question 30

What does Cohen highlight about the nature of post-war British society?

Answer 30

It was a period in which the newfound affluence, consumerism and hedonism of the young appeared to challenge the values of an older generation who had lived through the hardships of the 1930s and 40s.

Question 31

According to Cohen, why do moral panics occur at times of social change?

Answer 31

• Reflects anxieties many feel when accepted values seem to be undermined.
• ‘Boundary crisis’: uncertainty about where the boundary lay between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in a time of change.

Question 32

How might functionalists explain moral panics?

Answer 32

• Ways of responding to the sense of anomie or normlessness created by change.
• Dramatising the threat to society in the form of a folk devil allows media to raise collective consciousness and reasserts social controls when central values are threatened.

Question 33

How do Hall et al explain moral panics from a neo-Marxist perspective?

Answer 33

Moral panic over mugging (British media, 1970s) served to distract attention from the crisis of capitalism, divide w/c on racial grounds and legitimate more authoritarian style of rule.

Question 34

Briefly outline two criticisms of the concept of moral panics.

Answer 34

• Assumes societal reaction is a disproportionate over-reaction. But who is to decide what’s a proportionate or panicky reaction? Relates to left realist view that fear of crime is rational.
• What turns the ‘amplifier’ on and off: why are the media able to amplify some problems into a panic but not others? Why do panics not go on increasingly indefinitely once they’ve started.

Question 35

According to McRobbie and Thornton, why might moral panics have less of an impact in late modernity?

Answer 35

• Moral panics are now routine and have less impact.
• Modern society: little consensus about what is deviant.
• Harder for media to create panics about situations no longer regarded as deviant.

Question 36

According to Thomas and Loader, what is cyber-crime?

Answer 36

Computer-mediated activities that are either illegal or considered illicit by some, and are conducted through global electronic networks.

Question 37

Briefly explain the following categories of cyber-crime:

• Cyber-trespass
• Cyber-deception and theft

Answer 37

Cyber-trespass:
- Crossing boundaries into each others’ cyber-property. - Includes: hacking and sabotage, such as spreading viruses.

Cyber-deception and theft:

• Including identity theft, ‘phishing’ (obtaining identity or bank account details by deception)
• Also violation of intellectual property rights (e.g software privacy, illegal downloading and file-sharing).

Question 38

Briefly explain the following categories of cyber-crime:

• Cyber-pornography
• Cyber-violence

Answer 38

Cyber-pornography:
- Includes porn involving minors and opportunities for children to access porn on the net.

Cyber-violence:

• Doing psychological harm or inciting physical harm.
• Includes: cyber-stalking (e.g sending unwanted, threatening or offensive emails) and hate crimes against minority groups, as well as bullying by text.

Question 39

Why is it difficult to police cyber-crime?

Answer 39

• Sheer scale of the internet
• Limited resources of the police
• It’s globalised nature poses problems of jurisdiction (e.g in which country should someone be prosecuted for an Internet offence)
• Low priority: lacks excitement of more conventional policing)

Question 40

According to Jewkes, how does technology help the detection of cyber-crime?

Answer 40

ICT permits routine surveillance through: CCTV cameras, electronic databases, digital fingerprinting and ‘smart’ identity cards. Also instalation of listening devices called ‘carnivores’ (monitors email traffic)