crime + deviance: media

Question 1

how much did Williams and Dickinson find British newspapers spent on coverage of crime?

Answer 1

30%

Question 2

how does the media give a distorted image of crime?

Answer 2

-over-represent violent and sexual crime
-portray criminals and victims as older + more m/c
-exaggerate police success
-exaggerate risk of victimisation

Question 3

how much of media reports were about violent or sexual crime according to Ditton and Duffy?

Answer 3

46% but made up only 3% of crimes reported by the police

Question 4

what is dramatic fallacy according to Felson?

Answer 4

where the media overplays extraordinary crimes
-they also lead us to believe that one needs to be daring and clever to commit crimes ‘ingenuity fallacy’

Question 5

what do Schlesinger and Tumber notice about how media has changed from 1960s to 1990?

Answer 5

1960s = media focused on murder and petty crime
1990s = less on an interest partly due to abolition of death penalty + partly due to rising crime rate so crime had to be ‘special’ to attract coverage

Question 6

what do Cohen and Young say about news being a social construction?

Answer 6

‘news isn’t discovered but manufactured’

Question 7

give some example of news values…

Answer 7

-immediacy
-dramatisation
-personalisation
-higher status
-risk
-violence
-novelty/ unexpectedness

Question 8

what does Surrette say about fictional representations of crime?

Answer 8

they follow the ‘laws of opposites’ - they are the opposite of official statistics

Question 9

how does fictional representations of crime differ from official statistics?

Answer 9

-property crime = underrepresented
-fictional crops usually succeed
-fictional homicides are product of greed + calculation