Media and Crime

Question 1

Sociologists are interested in:

Answer 1

1. how the media represent crime, both in fiction and non fiction
2. the media as a cause of crime and the fear of crime
3. Moral panics and media amplification of deviance
4. Cybercrime

Question 2

Media representations of crime- William and Dickinson

Answer 2

found that British newspapers devote up to 30% of their news space to crime

Question 3

What evidence is there to suggest the media give a distorted image of crime?

Answer 3

As compared with official statistics,

• the media over represent violent and sexual crimes
• the media portray criminals and victims as older and more middle class than those usually found in the CJS. (Felson calls this ‘age fallacy’)
• The media exaggerate police success in clearing up cases
• Crime is reported as a series of separate events without examining underlying causes
• The media overplay extraordinary crimes (Felson calls this ‘dramatic fallacy’)

Question 4

News values and Crime coverage-

News is a social construction

Answer 4

The distorted picture of crime painted by the news media reflects the fact that news is a social construction. As Cohen and Young note, news is not discovered but manufactured:
news doesn’t simply exist out there waiting to be gathered in and written up by the journalist
Instead, it is the outcome of a social process whereby some potential stories are selected while others are rejected

Question 5

News values

Answer 5

A key element in the social construction of news is the concept of ‘news values’- the criteria that journalists and editors use in order to decide whether a story is newsworthy enough to make it into the news bulletin

Question 6

Key news values influencing the selection of crime stories include:

Answer 6

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

Question 7

Fictional representations of Crime

Answer 7

Fictional representations from TV, cinema and novels are also important sources of our knowledge of crime, because so much of their output is crime related

Question 8

What does Mandel estimate about fictional crime?

Answer 8

• From 1945 to 1984, over 10 billion crime thrillers were sold worldwide
• About 25% of prime time TV and 20% of films are crime shows or movies

Question 9

Surette- law of opposites

Answer 9

Surette claims that fictional representations are the opposite of official statistics- and strikingly similar to news coverage.

• Property crime is under-represented , while violence, drugs and sex crimes are over represented.
• Fictional sex crimes are committed by psychopath strangers, not acquaintances
• Fictional cops usually get their man

Question 10

What are the three recent trends in fictional crime?

Answer 10

• ‘Reality’ shows tend to feature young, non white ‘underclass’ offenders
• There is an increasing tendency to show police as corrupt, brutal and less successful
• Victims have become more central, with police portrayed as avengers and audiences invited to identify with their suffering

Question 11

The media as a cause of Crime

Answer 11

There has long been concern that the media have a negative effect on attitudes values and behaviour- especially on those thought most easily influenced, such as the young, lower classes, and the uneducated. In recent decades, ‘video nasties’, rap lyrics and computer games have been criticised for encouraging violence and criminality.

Question 12

There are several ways in which the media might cause crime and deviance, including:

Answer 12

• Imitation by providing deviant role models, resulting in ‘copycat’ behaviour
• Arousal e.g. through viewing violent imagery
• Desensitisation through repeated viewing of violence
• Transmitting knowledge of criminal techniques
• Stimulating desires for unaffordable goods, e.g. through advertising
• Glamourising crime

Question 13

Evaluation

Answer 13

• studies have tended to find that exposure to media violence has at most a small negative effect on audiences
• research on the media as a cause of crime often involves lab experiments. While this allows researchers to control the variables, the artificiality of the setting undermines validity
• lab experiments cannot easily measure long term effects

Question 14

Fear of crime

Answer 14

The media exaggerate the amount of violent crime and exaggerate the risks of certain groups becoming victims, e.g. young women, old people. This may cause unrealistic fear of crime.

Question 15

How does research evidence support the media creating fear of crime?

Answer 15

Schlesinger and Tumber found tabloid readers and heavy users of TV expressed a greater fear of going out at night and of becoming a victim

Question 16

The media, relative deprivation and crime

Answer 16

Left realists Lea and Young argue that the media increase relative deprivation among marginalised groups
In today’s society where even the poorest have media access, the media present everyone with images of a materialistic ‘good life’ as the goal to which they should strive. This stimulates the sense of relative deprivation and social exclusion felt by marginalised groups who cannot afford material goods

Question 17

Define a moral panic

Answer 17

A moral panic is an exaggerated and irrational over reaction by society to a perceived problem, where the reaction enlarges the problem out of all proportion to its real seriousness

Question 18

How may the media cause crime and deviance by creating a moral panic?

Answer 18

• The media identify a group as a folk devil or threat to societal values
• The media negatively stereotype the group and exaggerate the problem
• Moral entrepreneurs, editors, politicians etc. condemn the behaviour of the group, leading to calls for a ‘crackdown’.
• In turn, this may create a self fulfilling prophecy, amplifying the very problem that caused the panic in the first place (e.g. setting up special drug squads led the police to discover more drug taking)
• As the crackdown identifies more deviants, calls for even tougher action create a deviance amplification spiral

Question 19

The mods and rockers- Stanley Cohen’s study examines how the media’s response to disturbances between two groups of teenagers, the mods and rockers, created a moral panic

Answer 19

• In the early stages, distinctions were not clear cut and not many young people identified themselves as belonging to ‘either group’
• The initial confrontations started on Easter weekend 1964 at Clacton, with a few scuffles and minor property damage

Question 20

The media over reaction to the mods and rockers clash involved what three elements

Answer 20

• Exaggeration and distortion: The media exaggerated the numbers and seriousness, distorting the picture through sensational headlines
• Prediction: The media predicted further conflict and violence would result
• Symbolisation: the symbols of the mods and rockers (clothes, bikes and scooters) were negatively labelled.

Question 21

The media’s portrayal of events produced a deviance amplification spiral by making it appear that the problem was getting out of hand…

Answer 21

• this led to calls for an increased control response from the police and courts
• this produced further stigmatisation of the mods and rockers as deviant

Question 22

A deviance amplification spiral was created by defining the two groups and emphasising their supposed differences…

Answer 22

• this led to more youths adopting these identities and drew in more participants for future clashes
• this encouraged polarisation and created a SFP as youths acted out the roles the media had assigned to them.
• Cohen notes that the media’s definition of the situation is crucial in creating a moral panic, because in large-scale modern societies, most people have no personal experience of the events and must rely on the media for information
• Cohen argues that moral panics are a result of boundary crisis, where there is uncertainty about where the boundary lies between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in a time of change. The folk devil gives a focus to popular anxieties about disorder.

Question 23

Perspectives of moral panics- Functionalism

Answer 23

Functionalists see moral panics as ways of responding to the sense of anomie created by change. By dramatizing the threat to society in the form of a folk devil, the media raise the collective consciousness and reassert social controls when central values are threatened.

Question 24

Neo-Marxist perspective of moral panics

Answer 24

neo- Marxists have also used the concept of moral panics; e.g. Hall et al argue that the moral panic over ‘mugging’ served to distract attention from the crisis of capitalism

Question 25

How do Thomas and Loader define cyber crime?

Answer 25

Computer mediated activities that are either illegal or considered illicit, and are conducted through global electronic networks

Question 26

Jewkes

Answer 26

notes that the internet creates opportunities to commit both conventional crimes, e.g. fraud, and ‘new crimes using new tools’, e.g. software piracy

Question 27

Wall identifies four types of cyber crime including:

Answer 27

• Cyber trespass e.g. hacking
• Cyber deception e.g. identity theft
• Cyber pornography
• Cyber violence e.g. text bullying

Question 28

Policing cybercrime

Answer 28

This is difficult partly because of the sheer scale of the internet and because its globalised nature poses problems of jurisdiction

Question 29

Surviellance

Answer 29

ICT provides police and state with greater opportunities for surveillance and control, e.g. through CCTV cameras, electronic databases, digital fingerprinting.