Media and Crime

Question 1

How does fictional media represent criminals?

Answer 1

• Super-villain
• Stupid
• Psychopaths
• Rational

Question 2

How does fictional media represent victims?

Answer 2

• Female victims = helpless
• Male victims = vigilantes
• Ethnic majority

Question 3

How does fictional media represent the police?

Answer 3

• Super intelligent
• Idiots
• Always get the bad guy

Question 4

How does factual media represent criminals?

Answer 4

• Under class
• Ethnic minorities
• Young
• Men

Question 5

How does factual media represent victims?

Answer 5

• Missing white woman syndrome

- Selective reporting

Question 6

How does factual media represent the police?

Answer 6

• Corrupt
• Brutality
• Racists
• Incompetent

Question 7

What are the News Values?

Answer 7

• Immediacy
• Dramatisation
• Personalisation
• Higher status
• Simplification
• Novelty
• Risk
• Violence

Question 8

How does the media distort crime?

Answer 8

• Media reporting of crime is increasingly driven by the need for a spectacle. (dramatisation)
• Media coverage of crime is increasingly a mixture of entertainment and sensationalism leading to ‘infotainment’.
• Law of opposites: the media shows the direct opposite of official statistics.

Question 9

What is the functionalist perspective of crime?

Answer 9

• The media helps to keep social solidarity
• Crimes reported tend to reflect what people are most concerned about so the media meets demands.
• Not all forms of media are dominated by a single ideology or small group of owners pushing the same agenda.

Question 10

What is the marxist perspective of crime?

Answer 10

• The reporting of crime reflects the ideology of the ruling class.
• The crimes of the ruling class are underreported.
• Working class crimes are overreported.
• The reporting of crime is used as a way of maintaining control over powerless groups.

Question 11

What is the feminist perspective of crime?

Answer 11

• Crime reporting reinforces the stereotyping and oppression of women.
• Women are portrayed as victims.
• Underreporting of violence against women.
• Critical of reporting of sexual crimes against women.

Question 12

What is the interpretivist perspective of crime?

Answer 12

• The media (like crime) is a social construction.

- Media acts as a moral entrepreneur which determines who are deviant.

Question 13

What is the postmodernist perspective of crime?

Answer 13

• The media creates reality.

- People only have understandings of the representations of crime they experience through mass media.

Question 14

What are the ways that media causes crime?

Answer 14

• Imitation
• School of crime
• Arousal
• Desensitisation
• Deprivation
• Glamorisaton

Question 15

What is moral panic?

Answer 15

An instance of public anxiety or alarm in response to a problem regarded as threatening the moral standards of society.

Question 16

What is the fear of crime cycle?

Answer 16

Media causes a fear of becoming a victim of crime
-->
Spend more time at home
-->
Consume more media
-->
Generates more fear of crime

Question 17

What is the moral panic cycle?

Answer 17

1. An activity gains media attention
2. Agencies of control respond
3. Deviance becomes amplified
4. Exaggeration, symbolisation, prediction
5. Problem becomes redefined

Question 18

What are some criticisms of moral panic theory?

Answer 18

• The frequency of moral panics has increased so they’re no longer noteworthy
• Today there are many viewpoints and values in society.
• The concept of moral panics is well-known so some people try to create one for their own benefit.
• There is less certainty about what is unambiguously bad so moral panics are hard to start.
• People are wary about starting moral panics as there is a possibility of it rebounding on them.