the media Flashcards
Williamson and Dickinson - factual scores
- the media maybe our only source of knowledge about crime
- despite limited experience, information about crime and deviance is readily available
- Williamson and dickinson - 30% newspaper space is devoted to crime
Evaluation of willamson and Dickinson
despite fears, research has resulted in finding limited negative effect on audiences
Felson - Representations of crime in facts and fiction
- representations of crime to be found on news sources and in fiction present a distorted image of crime
- they diverge from the picture of crime presented by official statistics in the following ways: age fallacy, exaggerates of risk of victimisation, exaggerates the threat from psychopathic strangers
- the media underplays ‘ordinary’ crimes Felson calls this the dramatic fallacy, similarly media images lead us to believe that to commit crime one needs to be daring and clever - the ingenuity fallacy
Evaluation of Felson
left realists such as Lea and Young argue that the media disseminate a standardised image of image of lifestyle which depends on material goods and consumerism. for many marginalised groups this helps to increase the sense of relative deprivation
Reiner - news valances
- Suggests that media coverage and deviance is filtered through the values and assumptions of crime-thriller and film-script writers, and of journalists, about what makes a story ‘newsworthy’
- these values and assumptions are known as news values
- news is the outcome of a social process. Manufactured by editors and journalists who select and process stories by news value’s criteria by which a story is considered newsworthy
Evaluation of Reiner
schlesinger and tumber found a correlation between heavy TV use/tabloid readers and fear of becoming a victim especially physical attack
Greer & Reiner - Audiences
- Crimes excite and capture the popular imagination
- the media are always seeking out newsworthy stories of crime, they exploit the possibilities for a good story by dramatising, exaggerating, over-reporting and sensationalising some crimes out of proportion to their actual extent in society, in order to generate audience interest and encourage audiences to consume or buy their media products.
- explains why all media, both fact and fiction, tend to exaggerate the extent of violent crime, and why particularly any form of deviance by celebrities, no matter how trivial, receives massive coverage.
Laswell - hypodermic syringe model
- media have a negative effect on values, attitudes and behaviours, particularly vulnerable groups
- The media exerts a powerful and automatic influence on the audience, and can shape their beliefs and behaviors without any resistance or critical thinking.
- The model suggests that the media can have a “hypodermic” or “injecting” effect on the audience, much like a syringe injecting a drug directly into the bloodstream.
evaluation of Laswell
Feminist sociologists such as Orbach and have highlighted how the ‘beauty myth’, especially the representations of size zero as normal, have encouraged an increase in eating disorders, especially among young women, as well as an increase in mental health problems.
Cohen - folk devils and moral panics
- charted the media reaction to 2 groups of teenagers in mid 60s - mods and rockers.
- 3 elements : exaggeration + distortion (numbers involved, extent of violence), prediction(media assumed further conflict) and symbolisation (style,music and bikes were all negatively labelled)
- deviance amplification - this justified calls for control and helped to polarise groups who were not initially well defined, youth began to act out of roles that the media had given them
- media is crucial in creating moral panic as most people have no direct experience of events
Evaluation of Cohen
McRobbie and Thornton argues moral panics are outdated as the media has changed and developed. Because of the frequency moral panics aren’t rare anymore, a number of Moral Panics are discredited and rebound on the people who spread them and with the globalisation of the media we can see the context of stories now much easier than before. Moral panics have less of an impact.
Evaluation to Greer and Reiner
research may ignore the meanings that individuals give to media violence.
This reflects the interpretivist view that if we want to understand the effects of the media we must look at the meanings give to what they see and read
