CRIME + DEVIANCE - Media and Crime Flashcards
Fear of Crime
There is concern that the media may be distorting the public’s impression of crime, causing an unrealistic fear of crime
Agenda Setting
The ability to influence the importance placed on topics of the public agenda.
News Values
This is the criteria by which journalists deem whether a story is newsworthy or not.
Immediacy (breaking news)
dramatization (excitement)
personalisation (human interest stories about individuals)
higher status (celebrities etc.)
simplification (eliminating grey areas), novelty (new angles)
risk (vulnerability and fear stories centring on victim)
violence (spectacular and visible acts).
Relative Deprivation
By showing people lifestyles they desire but cannot have, the media creates a sense of relative deprivation that causes people to resort to crime to get the commodities they cannot legitimately get.
Cultural Criminology
This places criminality and its control in the context of culture. It views crime and the agencies of crime control as cultural products.
Commodification of Crime
Transforming crime into a marketable good. In our late modern society, the media commodifies crime.
Moral Panics
A moral panic is an exaggerated over-reaction by society to a perceived problem, usually driven by the media
Folk Devils
A scapegoat essentially.
Moral Entrepreneurs
Individuals or groups that seek to influence a group to adopt or maintain a norm.
Deviancy Amplification Spiral
A media hype phenomenon defined by media critics as a cycle of increasing numbers of reports on a category of anti-social behaviour or some other undesirable event leading to a moral panic.
MEDIA AS A CAUSE OF CRIME
What does this mean?
What does Sonia Livingstone believe?
This has been a historic trend – in the 1920s, and 1930s, cinema was blamed for corrupting the youth. More recently, rap and computer games has been criticised for creating violence among youth.
The media may cause crime through imitation, arousal, desensitisation, transmitting criminal knowledge, stimulating desires for unaffordable goods, portraying the police as incompetent, and through glamourising offending.
Sonia Livingstone notes, that even if studies point to a limited impact, people continue to be preoccupied with effects on media on children because of our desire to regard childhood as an innocent part of life.
MEDIA AS A CAUSE OF CRIME
Distorting public impression of crime
What do Gerber et al say?
There is concern that the media may be distorting the public’s impression of crime, causing a fear of crime.
Gerber et al found that heavy users of television had higher levels of fear of crime.
The existence of such correlations doesn’t prove that media viewing causes fear.
E.g., it may be that those who are already afraid of going out, watch more TV, because they stay in more.
MEDIA AS A CAUSE OF CRIME
What doe Left Realists believe about media and its role in creating crime?
How far media portrayals of normal rather than criminal lifestyles might also lead people to commit crime.
E.g., left realists argue that mass media helps to increase the sense of relative deprivation – the feeling of being deprived relative to others.
Even the poorest have access to media, and the media presents everyone with images of a materialistic ‘good life’ of leisure, fun, and consumer goods as the norm to which they should conform.
This encourages exclusion among those who cannot afford their consumerist desires.
MEDIA AS A CAUSE OF CRIME
What do cultural criminologists believe about the media and its role in creating crime?
What do Hayward and Young believe about media?
They argue that the media turn crime itself into the commodity they desire – rather than producing crime in their audiences, media encourages them to partake in crime.
CC’s, Hayward and Young see late modern society as a media-saturated one, where we are immersed in the mediascape, where there is a blurring between reality of crime and its image.
E.g., a gang fight is no longer a gang fight, it’s a packaged and sold commodity on the www.
MEDIA AS A CAUSE OF CRIME
Late modern societies and their role in selling crime
Late modern society emphasises consumption and thrill, so crime becomes commodified.
Corporations and advertisers use media images of crime to sell products, especially in the youth market – e.g., gangster rap and hip hop clothing etc.
So, crime and deviance become a style to be consumed – it is marketed to young people as romantic, cool, exciting etc.
FCUK, Section 60, Opium perfume etc.
Companies use moral panic, controversy, and scandal to market their products.
E.g., you can’t wear a hoodie at Bluewater but you can buy one.
MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF CRIME
What did Ditton and Duffy find?
Ditton and Duffy found that 46% of media reports were about sexual and violent crimes, yet in total, these only made up 3% of all crimes recorded
MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF CRIME
What did Felson find?
His three fallacies.
The media portray criminals and victims as older and more M.C, which is not proportionate to the stats found in the official statistics.
Felson notes this as the (1) AGE FALLACY
The media also over-represent police success because they want to be popular and prevent panics.
The media overplay extraordinary crimes and underplay ordinary ones, which Felson calls the (2) DRAMATIC FALLACY.
He also addresses how the media leads us to believe that if were to commit a crime, one needs to be daring and clever to solve it (3) INGENUITY FALLACY.
MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF CRIME
How and when does media coverage of crime change?
What did Soothill and Walby find?
It depends on the pressing issues of that particular time…
Soothill and Walby found that newspaper reporting of rape cases increased from under a quarter of all cases in 1951 to over a third in 1985.
The media identifies the perpetrator as ‘beasts’ creating further misrepresentation as most perpetrators are known to their victims.
MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF CRIME
Explain the process of crime being manufactured
What did Cohen and Young believe?
Distorted picture of crime reflects the fact that the news is simply a social construction. News is not discovered, but ‘manufactured’ - Cohen and Young.
News values - criteria by which journalists deem whether a story is newsworthy or not. If a story can be told using this criterion, it has greater chance of being successful.
Immediacy, dramatization, personalisation , higher status, simplification, novelty, risk, and violence.
MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF CRIME
Who explores the law of opposites and the representation of fictious crime?
Fictional representations of crime, is what Surette labels ‘the law of opposites’ – they are the opposite of the official statistics, and similar to the news coverage…
E.g.,
Property crime is under-represented, sex crimes are committed by psychopaths and not acquaintances, villains are M.C, white men, fictional cops get the man they’re looking for etc.
Recent trends however, put this on break – infotainment now focuses on the W.C, non-white offender, there is increasing tendency to outline the corrupt nature of the cops etc.
MORAL PANICS
Who are moral entrepreneurs and what do they do?
Moral entrepreneurs who disapprove of particular behaviour may use the media to put pressure on authorities to ‘do something’, about the alleged issue.
Usually, their campaign if successful, will put a negative label on the behaviour so it’ll affect the law.
MORAL PANICS
What is a moral panic?
A moral panic is an exaggerated over-reaction by society to a perceived problem, usually driven by the media.
The reaction enlarges and distorts the issue
MORAL PANICS
What is a folk devil?
The media identifies a group as a folk devil, presents this group as negative and exaggerates the scale of the problem –
moral entrepreneurs, politicians, and police chiefs (and other respectable people) condemn the group and its behaviour.
MORAL PANICS
Explore the Deviancy Amplification Spiral
Moral entrepreneurs disapprove of behaviour.
They pressurise authorities to do something to stop this behaviour.
Media drives a complete over-reaction to the issue.
The media identifies a folk devil and presents them in a negative light.
Moral entrepreneurs and others condemn this behaviour.
They crackdown the folk devil.
This leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby the problem is amplified.