media Flashcards
media and crime
A large amount of news coverage is dedicated to crime and deviance, however the media offers us a distorted view of crime: It over represents violent and sexual crime. It over exaggerates police success. It over exaggerates the intelligence of offenders.
Kidd- Hewitt and Osborne
crime as a ‘consumer spectacle’
- Crime is a major theme in popular culture.
- Fictional and non-fictional crime stories have provided significant sources of spectacle and mass entertainment.
- In fiction, comic books, thrillers and films often have acts of crime and violence as central features.
- Media news is full of stories of crime and deviance – info about crime is packaged to entertain, for example Crimewatch and Netflix serial killer documentaries
- Criminals are portrayed as good looking, and their criminality is seen as appealing - ‘bad boy’ (but usually just in men…)
amanda knox
Kooistra and Mahoney
infotainment
* We now learn about crime through the media, quite often in a over-dramatised way.
- Media coverage of crime is a mixture of information and entertainment (infotainment)
Katz- ’newsworthiness’
- Crime news is characterised by which one elicits a strong emotional response which he uses to explain why crime is newsworthy.
- Crime creates moral dilemmas through which people like to think about their own lives and morals.
- The media focuses much more on criminals than the victims or the police. The public are encouraged to see risk-taking behaviour as attractive and exciting. They are encouraged to think about how they would feel if they were in the same situation as the criminal.
Galtung and Ruge
found that the more dramatic the content, the more negative the content and the more sudden then the more newsworthy it was.
e.g. Nicola Bulley
cohen
The role of the media is imporant in the portrayal of criminal and deviant behaviour. The media creates moral panics by exaggerating the extent of a crime and turns those deviating into folk devils
