Crime & Deviance: Crime & the Media Flashcards
Media and Official stats
-Media over-represent violent & sexual crime. Ditton & Duffy found that 46% of media reports were about violent or sexual crimes, yet made up only 3% of all crimes recorded by police.
-Media portray criminals & victims as older and more M/C.
-Media coverage exaggerated police success to represent them in a good light.
-Media exaggerates risk of victimisation.
-Crime is reported as a series of separate events.
-Media overplay extraordinary crimes - dramatic fallacy.
Changes in type of coverage
-Schlesinger & Tumber found that in the 60s, the focus had been on murders and petty crimes.
-By the 90s, these were of lesser interest, partly because of abolition of death penalty & because crimes had to be ‘special’ to attract attention, due to rising rates.
-Soothill & Walby found that newspaper reporting of rape cases increased from under 1/4 of all cases in 1951 to over 1/3 in 1985.
-Coverage also always focussed on identifying a ‘sex fiend’ or ‘beast’.
-A distorted idea spread that rapists are psychopathic strangers, but usually they’re known to the victim.
Media representation of crime: News values & crime coverage
-The distorted picture of crime painted by the news media reflects that news is a social construction.
-News is an outcome of a social process in which some stories are selected and others rejected.
-Cohen & Young note that news isn’t discovered, but manufactured.
-News values influence the selection of crime stores;
-> immediacy
-> dramatisation
-> unexpectedness
-> risk & violence
Media representation of crime: Fictional representations of crime
-Mandel estimates that from 1945 to 1984, over 10 billion crime thrillers were sold worldwide & about 20% of shows/movies are crime.
-Fictional reps of crime are what Surette calls the law of opposites which are opposite to OS, but similar to news coverage.
Fictional representations of crime: Trends
-Property crime is under-represented & violence & sec crimes, over.
-Real life homocides usually are due to domestic disputes, but fictional ones due to calculation and greed.
-Fictional sex crimes committed by psychopathic strangers.
-Fictional cops usually get their man.
Recent trends;
-Young, POC ‘underclass’ offenders.
-Police increasingly seen as corrupt and brutal.
-Victims have become more central.
The media as a cause of crime
Media has a negative effect on attitudes of the young, lower classes & uneducated.
-20-30s, cinema blamed, 50s, horror comics were blamed, 80s, ‘video nasties’ & recently, it’s rap lyrics & GTA.
How?
-Imitation through role models
-Desensitisation
-Transmitting knowledge of criminal techniques
-Advertising unaffordable goods
-Glamourising offending
-Schramm et al says that for most children television is not harmful or beneficial.
-Livingstone notes that childhood is regarded as a time of uncontaminated innocence.
The media as a cause of crime: Fear of crime
-Evidence suggests that there’s a link between media use & fear of crime.
-Gerbner et al found that heavy users of television had higher levels of fear of crime.
-Schlesinger & Tumber found a correlation between media consumption and fear of crime with heavy users expressing greater fear of becoming victims.
:( However, correlation isn’t causation.
:( Greer & Reiner note, much ‘effects’ research on the media as a cause of crime or fear of crime ignored meanings that viewers give to media violence, which may be different to it in horror films or news bulletins.
The media as a cause of crime: The media, relative deprivation & crime
-Left realists argue that the mass media help increase the sense of relative deprivation (feeling of being deprived relative to others - among poor & marginalised groups).
-Media presents everyone with images of a materialistic good life of leisure is the norm to which they should conform.
-This leads to exclusion felt by marginalised groups who cannot afford these goods.
-As Merton states, the pressure to conform causes deviant behaviour when legitimate means are blocked.
The media as a cause of crime: Cultural criminology, the media & crime
-RD explains how the media produce crime.
-Cultural criminology argues media turns crime itself into a commodity that people desire & media encouraged people to consume crime.
-Hayward & Young see late modern society as media-saturated where we’re immersed in the mediascape (expanding tangle of digital crime images).
-Blurring between image & reality of crime means they’re inseparable so media and crime control constitutes or creates crime itself.
-E.g. gang assaults are staged for the camera and packaged. & police cat cameras don’t just record police activity.
Media & the Commodification of crime
-Feature of late modernity is the emphasis on consumption, excitement & immediacy.
-Hayward & Young argue advertisers use crime to sell products.
-E.g. Hip hop stars parade designer chic clothing etc.
-Fenwick & Hayward say ‘crime is marketed to young people’ as ‘…cultural symbol’.
-Hayward & Young argue it’s the same with mainstream products (street riots/joyriding) & fashion industry use brands like Opium & violence against women.
-Even countercultures are packaged and sold, graffiti is the marker of deviant urban cool.
-Corporations use brandalism to sell everything from theme parks to cars and video games.
:( Designer labels valued by young people now function as symbols of deviance (ie. some pubs deny entry to individuals wearing certain brands & Bluewater banned hoodies.
Brands have become a tool of classification for profiling.
Moral panics
Moral entrepreneurs disapprove of particular behaviours and may use media to put pressure on alleged issues and their campaigning may lead to negative labelling or new laws.
-E.g. Intro of Marijuana Tax act (media caused crime by criminalising marijuana).
-In a moral panic;
-> media identifies folk devils or threat to societal values.
-> media presents group in a negative fashion exaggerating extent of problem.
-> moral entrepreneurs condemn group and behaviour.
Leads to calls for ‘crackdowns’ on group which can lead to self-fulfilling prophecy, amplifying the problem and creating more deviants.
Moral panics: Mods & Rockers (Cohen 1972)
-Cohen examines media’s response to disturbances among 2 groups of W/C teenagers at English seaside resorts.
-Mods wore smart dress & rode scooters and rockers wore leather jackets and rode motorbikes.
-Confrontations started with a few scuffles, stone throwing etc.
-Media exaggerated numbers involved & extent of damage “Day of Terror by Scooter gangs”.
-Media predicted further conflict would result.
-Symbols of mods and rockers (clothing) was negatively labelled and associated with deviance.
Mods & Rockers: Deviance amplification spiral
-Cohen argued that an increased response from police produced further marginalisation and stigmatisation of the mods and rockers, and less tolerance of them leading to an upwards spiral.
-Media amplified deviance by defining the groups and their sub cultural styles leading to youths adopting these and creating 2 distinct identity, encouraging polarisation and self-fulfilling prophecy as youths acted out the assigned roles by the media.
-Media could portray mods and rockers as folk devils, so people relied on these events.
Mods and rockers: The wider context
-Period of newfound affluence, consumerism of the young challenging values of the older gen who lived through hardships of 30-40s.
-Cohen says moral panics can occur at times of social change, reflecting anxieties people feel when their values are undermined.
-Argues the moral panic was a result of a boundary crisis where there was uncertainty between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour and folk devils gives focus to this.
-Functionalists say these are ways of responding to anomie created by change and the media raises collective consciousness and reasserts social control.
-Hall et al says that moral panics about mugging were to divert attention from capitalism and divide the W/C on racial grounds.
Criticisms of the idea of moral panics
-Assumes societal reactions are a disproportionate reaction but who decides what’s rational?
-Why can media amplify some problems into a panic, but not others?
-Late modernity: McRobbie & Thornton argue moral panics are now routine and have less impact and there’s less consensus of what is deviant.
-Things condemned years ago (single motherhood) aren’t universally deviant so less likely to cause panics.
