Media Flashcards
6 ways non fiction represents crime
- Over represents violent + sexual crimes
- Age fallacy - portrays criminas/victims as older and more middle class - Felson
- Exaggerates police success
- Exaggerates risks of victimisation
- reported as seperate events
- overplays unusual crime - dramatic fallacy - Felson (underplays ordinary crimes)
Pearson
People are both fascinated and fearful of crime
Why is the news not a good thing?
News is a social construct
Stories are chosen, others are rejected
8 News Values
Young 1973
- Immediacy - on trend (breaking news)
- Dramatisation - action and excitement
- Personalisation - human interest
- Celebrities - well known names
- Simplification - easy for public to grasp
- Novelty - new and interesting or ‘weird’
- Risk - stories of vulnerability, victims and fear
- Violence - visible and attention grabbing
Fictional representations of crime - Surette
- Opposite to official statistics
- Few property Crimes
- Killing due to greed / calculation, not brawls (reality)
- Crimes are being commited by psychopathic stranger - usually not the case
- Villains are higher status, middle aged white males
- Cops always win
Why do people think that the media may cause crime?
Has a negative effect on attitudes, values and behaviours, especially of those groups most susceptible to influence such as the young
Media often blamed for moral decline
Encourgae violence e.g. video games like Call Of Duty
8 ways media causes crime
- Imitation - by providing deviant role models, resulting in copycat behaviour
- Arousal - by viewing violent or sexual imagery
- Densensitisation - by viewing violence
- Transmitting knowledge of criminal techniques
- As a target for crime i.e stealing Ipads
- Stimulating desire for unaffordable goods e.g. through advertisement
- Portraying police as incompetent
- Glamorising offending
Schlesinger and Tumber
Changes in news coverage over time
Trends in media coverage depend on news values and current politics
- 1960s - focus on murder + petty crime
- 1990s - widened - drugs, child abuse, terrosism, hooliganism and mugging
Left Realist view on media
The media increases the sense of relative deprivation
- Marketing/advertisement + showing off glamorous lifestyles
Interationist view on media
S. Cohen - Moral panics ‘mods and rockers’
Goode and Yehuda
- concern about group in society
- hostility
- consensus
- disproportional anxiety compared to actual threats
- volatility
Marxist view on media
- media representa more capitalism
- news sales and programme supscriptions
- encourages consumption and materialism
- uses violence and sex to sell more
Feminism view on crime
Media continues to support patriarchy
Women = Victims
Women = Objectified
Gendered roles in fiction - sterotyping
Walls Cyber crime categories
- Cyber trespass (hacking)
- Cyber deception (identity theft)
- Cyber pornography (porn involves minors of violence)
- Cyber violence (psychological harm)
Gerbner et al
Found that heavy users of tv (4+ hours) had higher fear levels of crime
Criticisms
- moral panics have criticisms due to assumption that societal reaction is disproportionate, but who decides what is an acceptable reaction? LRs argue fear of crime is rational
- does not answer why media amplifies some problems but not others
- in todays society where we are often exposed to shock and horror stories, do we really react with panic to media exaggeration
