Media representations & the reporting of crime

Question 1

News

Answer 1

News is a social construction: the outcome of a social process in which some potential stories are selected while others are rejected. Stan Cohen & Jock Young note that news is not discovered but manufactured. News media cannot report everything that happens, so they select material according to a set of news values, most of which are chosen to interest readers/viewers. These include:
▪ Unexpectedness – rare or unusual behaviour;
▪ Negativity – a tragic of disturbing event;
▪ Immediacy – events that happen suddenly, as opposed
to slowly developing trends;
▪ Continuity – choosing events that link with similar ones.

Question 2

Distorted view

Answer 2

giving the public a distorted view of the frequency of different types of crime. The continuity value results in a high proportion of similar cases, such as ‘muggings’, being published over a certain period, giving the false impression that there is a crime wave (Fishman, 1973). This is likely to subside when an interesting new topic is found, but the effect can be to make the public so fearful that many avoid going out at night, enabling criminals to operate more freely in the streets.

Question 3

Marxists

Answer 3

Marxists suggest that media content is also influenced by the central value system – the ideology of the ruling class – because most media owners are right wing (e.g. Rupert Murdoch) & choose editors & journalists accordingly.

Agenda-setting occurs so that working-class crime is over-emphasised & the offenders described in alarming terms, while corporate, white-collar & state crimes receive far less coverage.

Homicide is the most widely reported type of crime, making up about a third of all reports, and is more likely to get coverage if it involves sexual motives, monetary gain, revenge or jealousy. The murder of children, women & famous or high-status individuals get the most coverage (Peelo et al, 2004).

Question 4

examples of distorted images

Answer 4

• The media over-represent violent & sexual crime – Ditton & Duffy found that 46% of media reports were about violent & sexual crimes, yet these made up only 3% of all crimes recorded by the police. More recently, coverage of rape consistently focuses on identifying a ‘sex fiend’ or ‘beast’ creating a very distorted picture of rape and with the recent emphasis on the historical sexual abuse of children there is an even greater proportion of reporting focused on sex crimes.
• Media coverage exaggerates police success in clearing up cases – partly because the police are a major source of crime stories & want to look good & partly because the over reported violent crime has a higher clear-up rate than property crime.
• The media exaggerate the risk of victimisation – especially to women, white people & higher status individuals.

• Crime is reported as a series of separate events without examining underlying causes.
• The media overplay extraordinary crimes – Richard Felson calls this the ‘dramatic fallacy’.
There is evidence of changes in the type of coverage of crime by the news media over time. By the 1990s, reporting had widened from murders & petty crime to include sex crimes, drugs, child abuse, terrorism, football hooliganism & mugging.

Question 5

Pluralism

Answer 5

A more positive & influential theory of why some stories about crime – but not others – are selected for inclusion in the media is pluralism. From a pluralist point of view, the content of the media reflects the interests of the public. Commercial media rely upon audiences to generate income, so if they run stories or put on entertainment that is not popular, then the audience will go elsewhere & the media organisation will be forced to change, or risk going out of business. Minority audiences can be catered for in parts of the media that do not require a mass audience to be viable, e.g. in magazine publishing & on internet sites.

Yvonne Jewkes (2015) notes that pluralists argue that with the advent of the internet & social media, the media have become even more diverse, so that almost anyone can create media content (e.g. through a blog, YouTube or Twitter). Jewkes suggests that this creates the potential for individuals or groups to challenge government & other established views of crime.

Question 6

Fictional representations

Answer 6

Fictional representations from TV, cinema & novels are also important sources of our knowledge of crime, because so much of their output is crime-related. About 25% of prime time TV & 20% of films involve crime. Representations are strikingly similar to news coverage – e.g. property crime is under represented, while violence, drugs & sex crime are over-represented; fictional sex crimes are committed by psychopathic strangers, not acquaintances; fictional cops usually get their man.

However, recent trends show an increasing tendency to show police as corrupt, brutal & less successful; victims have become more central to stories; & there is a new genre of young, non-white ‘underclass’ offenders

Question 7

A03

Answer 7

It should be noted that documentaries on TV & discussion in ‘serious’, broadsheet newspapers do comment on corporate crime (e.g. the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster), state crime (e.g. torture by UK & US military in Iraq), police racism, misconduct by bankers or the effects of pollution on climate change. Therefore there is some variety in media coverage of crime, even if the dominant coverage does tend to support a consensual view of society.