MEDIA AND CRIME

Question 1

Crime and the Media
Sociologists are interested in 4 aspects of media and crime:

Answer 1

1. How the media represents crime
2. The media as a source of crime and of the fear of crime
3. Moral panics and media amplification of deviance
4. Cybercrime

Question 2

Williams and Dickinson, 1993

Answer 2

• Found that British newspapers devote up to 30% of their news spaces to crime

Question 3

How media give a distorted image of crime, criminals and policing

Answer 3

• Over-representation violent and sexual crime
• The portrayal of criminals and victims as older and middle-class
• Over-exaggeration of police success
• Exaggeration of the risk of victimisation
• Crime is reported as a series of separate events w/out structure and w/out examining underlying causes
• Overplay of extraordinary crimes and underplay of ordinary crimes

Question 4

Ditton and Duffy, 1983
Over-representation violent and sexual crime

Answer 4

• Found that 46% of media reports were about violent or sexual crimes, yet these make up only 3% of all crimes recorded by the police

Question 5

Felson, 1998

Answer 5

• Calls the portrayal of criminals and victims as older and middle-class ‘dramatic fallacy’ and the overplay of extraordinary crimes the ‘dramatic fallacy’.

Question 6

Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994

Answer 6

• Found that in the 60s the focus has been on murders and petty crime, but by the 90s, possibly due to the abolition of the death penalty, these crimes were of less interest to the media.
• Rising crime rates meant that a crime had to be ‘special to attract coverage.
• Reporting had also widened to include drugs, child abuse, terrorism, mugging and sex crimes..

Question 7

Soothill and Walby, 1991

Answer 7

• Found that newspaper reporting of rape cases increased in under 1/4 of all cases in 1951 to over 1/3 in 1985
• Coverage consistently focuses on identifying a ‘sex fiend’ or ‘beast’, often by use of labels, falsely presenting rape as a crime committed by psychopathic strangers rather than the reality where the perpetrator is usually someone known to the victim.

Question 8

Cohen and Young, 1973

Answer 8

• News is not discovered but manufactured.
• It is a social process where stories are selected and others neglected and so the image of crime is socially constructed.

Question 9

Key news values influencing the selection of crime stories

Answer 9

• Immediacy - ‘breaking news’
• Dramatisation - action and excitement
• Personalisation - human interest
• Higher-status persons
• Simplification - eliminating shades of grey
• Novelty or unexpectedness - a new angle
• Risk - victim-centred stories about vulnerability and fear
• Violence - especially visibility and spectacular acts

Question 10

Fictional representations of crime

Answer 10

• Fictional representations from TV, cinemas and novels are also important sources of our knowledge as so much of their output is crime-related and can contribute to people’s perceptions of crime and deviance. Fictional representations follow.
• Surette’s (1998) ‘law of opposites’, they are the opposite of the official stats and similar to news coverage.

Question 11

Mandel (1984)

Answer 11

• Estimates that from 1945 to 1984, 10 billion crime thriller books were sold worldwide and 20% of films were about crime.

Question 12

Surette, 1998

Answer 12

• Law of opposites - media represents crime opposite to official statistics.
• For example: Property crime is under-represented, violent crimes are over-represented.
• While real-life homicides mainly result from brawls and domestic disputes, fictional ones are the product of greed and calculation.

Question 13

3 recent trends in the portrayal of crime in the media

Answer 13

1. The new genre of ‘reality’ infotainment shows tend to feature non-white ‘underclass’ offenders
2. There is an increased tendency to show police as corrupt, brutal and less successful
3. Victims have become less central, with law enforcers portrayed as their avengers and audiences invited to identify the sufferers

Question 14

The media as a cause of crime

Answer 14

There has been a concern that the media have a negative effect on attitudes, values and behaviour e.g. “Video nasties”, rap lyrics and computer games have been criticised for encouraging violence and criminality.

Question 15

Ways in which the media may cause crime and deviance

Answer 15

• Imitation (deviant role-models)
• Arousal (viewing violent or sexual imagery)
• Desensitisation
• Transmitting knowledge of criminal techniques
• As a target for crime e.g. theft of TVs
• By stimulating desires for unaffordable goods (advertising)
• Portraying the police as incompetent
• Glamourising offending

Question 16

Livingstone, 1996

Answer 16

• Despite conclusions such as Schramm et al’s, people continue to be preoccupied with the effects of the media on children because of our desire as a society to regard childhood as a time of uncontaminated innocence in the private sphere.

Question 17

Fear of crime

Answer 17

• The media stimulates this fear through exaggerating the risks of certain groups of people becoming its victims.
• By this, the media may be distorting the public’s impression of crime and causing an unrealistic fear of crime.
• Though it is important to consider that various sociological and psychological dimensions of people’s lives, modern-day anxieties and crime itself also creates this fear.

Question 18

Schlesinger and Tumber, 1992

Answer 18

• Found a correlation between media consumption and fear of crime, with tabloid readers and heavy users of TV expressing greater fear of becoming a victim, especially of physical attack and mugging.
• However such correlations do not prove causation.
• **For example, those who stay in more because they are afraid of going out at night watch more TV just because they stay in more.``

Question 19

Greer and Reiner, 2012

Answer 19

• Note that suggested ‘effects’ that research suggests the media has on crime or fear of crime ignore the meanings that viewers give to media violence.
• From an interpretivist perspective, they argue that if we want to understand the possible effects of the media, we must look at the meanings people give to what they see and read.

Question 20

The media, relative deprivation and crime

Answer 20

• The consideration of how far the media portrayals of ‘normal’ rather than criminal lifestyles might also encourage people to commit crime (‘normal’ presented lifestyle is unattainable for some by legitimate means)

Question 21

Media and relative deprivation: Left realists

Answer 21

• Argue that mass media help to increase the sense of relative deprivation among the poor and marginalised social groups by disseminating a standardized image of lifestyle associated with materialism and consumerism.
• This is a norm expects conformity and so stimulates social exclusion as some marginalised groups cannot afford these goods and this lifestyle.
• As Merton argues, this pressure can cause deviant behaviour when the opportunity to achieve by legitimate means is blocked. People resort to crime to get the commodities they cannot achieve legitimately.

Question 22

Cultural criminology, the media and crime

Answer 22

• Cultural criminology argues that the media turn crime itself into the commodity that people desire.
• Rather than simply producing crime in their audiences, the media encourage them to consume crime, in the form of images of crime.

Question 23

Hayward and Young, 2012
Cultural criminology, the media and crime

Answer 23

• See late modern society as a media-saturated society, where we are immersed in the ‘media-scape’ - an ever-expanding tangle of fluid digital images, including images of crime which distorts the perception of the reality of crime, so that the two are no longer clearly distinct or separable.

Question 24

Media and the commodification of crime

Answer 24

• A further feature of late modernity is the emphasis on consumption, excitement and immediacy.
• In this context, crime and its thrills become commodified. Corporations and advertisers use media images of crime to sell products.

Question 25

Fenwick and Hayward, 2000

Answer 25

• Crime is packaged, marketed to young people as cool, romantic, exciting, cool, and a fashionable symbol.
  Media has commodified crime.
• Perfume names are usually tabboos, Opium, Poison, Obsession.
• Heroin chic model trend of 90s. Counter-culture is packaged and sold.
• Graffiti is the marker of deviant urban cool, but corporations use a technique called ‘brandalism’ to sell everything from them parks to cars and video games.
• Companies use moral panics, controversies and scandal to market their products.
• Ironically, however, designer labels so valued by young people as badges of identity now function as indicators of deviance. In some towns.
• for example, local bars and police compile lists of branded clothing that they see as problematic; they are tools of classification for constructing profiles of potential criminals.

Question 26

Moral panics and the media

Answer 26

• The media can also cause crime through labelling.
• Moral entrepreneurs, for example, may use the media to pressure the authorities to address the alleged problem.
• If successful, their campaigning will result in the negative labelling of the behaviour and perhaps a change in the law.
• An example of this includes the Marijuana Taxt Act in the USA which was arguably caused by the media labelling marijuana smoking as deviant.
• Creating a moral panic in this way is an important element of this process.

Question 27

Process of a moral panic

Answer 27

• The media identify a target as a folk devil or threat to societal values
• The media present the group in a negative, stereotypical fashion and exaggerate the scale of the problem
• Moral entrepreneurs, editors, politicians and other ‘respectable’ figures condemn the group and its behaviours
• This usually leads to a ‘crackdown’ on the group.
• However, this may create a self-fulfilling prophecy that amplifies the very problem that caused the panic in the first place e.g. drug squads led the police to discover more drug taking and identify more deviants which only calls for tougher action, creating a deviancy amplification spiral.

Question 28

Mods and rockers as an example of a modern panic (media)

Answer 28

• Their disorder was exaggerated by the media.
• In his analysis, Cohen uses the analogy of a disaster, where the media produce an inventory or stocktaking of what happened comprising 3 elements:
• Exaggeration and distortion - the media exaggerates numbers involved, the extent of violence and damage and distort the picture through dramatic reporting and sensationalised headlines
• Prediction - in the case of the mods and rockers the media regularly assumed and predicted further conflict and violence would result.
• Symbolisation - symbols associated with the folk devils negatively label them and often associate them with deviance. M+Rs: These symbols allowed them to link unconnected events.
• For example, bikers in different parts of the country who misbehaved could be seen as a part of a more general underlying problem of disorderly youth.
• This led to calls for increased control response from the police and courts, producing further marginalisation and stigmatisation of the m+rs as deviants.
• Youths began to adopt the presented styles of the two groups which drew in more participants for future clashes.
• By emphasising their supposed differences they encouraged polarisation and helped to create a SFP of escalating conflict as youths acted out the roles the media had assigned to them. (DAS)

Question 29

The wider context of the mods and rockers moral panic

Answer 29

• Post-war Britain, a period of new-found affluence, consumerism and hedonism of the young appeared to challenge the hardships of the 30s and 40s.
• Cohen argued that moral panics often occur in times of social change, reflecting the anxieties many people feel when accepted values seem to be undermined.
• The moral panic was a result of a boundary crisis, where there was an uncertainty between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in a time of change.
• The folk devil created by the media symbolises and gives focus to popular anxieties about social disorder

Question 30

Functionalist perspective of moral panics

Answer 30

• Moral panics can be seen as ways of responding to the sense of anomie or normlessness created by change
• By dramatizing the threat in the form of a folk devil , the media raises the collective consciousness and reasserts social control when central values are threatened.

Question 31

Moral panics, the media and crime
EV.

Answer 31

• Assumes that the societal reaction is a disproportionate over-reaction but how can this be reliably and objectively measured?
• McRobbie and Thornton (1995) argue that moral panics are now routine and have less impact.
• In late modern society, there is little consensus on what is deviant. Lifestyle choices that were condemned 40 years ago, such as single motherhood for instance, are no longer universally regarded as deviant and so it is harder for the media to create panics about them.