The media and crime

Question 1

What are news values?

Answer 1

Journalists use a set of criteria to decide whether a story is newsworthy

Question 2

What are the nine news values?

Answer 2

Immediacy, dramatisation, personalisation, higher status, simplification, unexpectedness, risk, violence and negativity

Question 3

What is immediacy?

Answer 3

If crime is close enough geographically to the readers of the article and if it is happening now

Question 4

What is dramatisation?

Answer 4

How exciting the story can be presented through drama and action

Question 5

What is higher status?

Answer 5

Events surrounding the famous and the powerful are often seen as more newsworthy

Question 6

What is unexpectedness?

Answer 6

Rare, unpredictable and surprising events have more newsworthiness than routine events

Question 7

What did Mandel estimate?

Answer 7

Between 1945 and 1984 over 10 billion crime thrillers were sold worldwide

Question 8

How do the media represent violence?

Answer 8

The representation of violence has become more explicit and extreme over time. Property crime is underrepresented compared with the official statistics.

Question 9

How do the media represent murder?

Answer 9

The motive for murder is often shown as greed and calculation. Most homicides result from domestic conflicts or fights between young men.

Question 10

How do the media represent sex crimes?

Answer 10

TV fiction and news stories show that sex crimes are committed by psychopathic strangers. Most sex crimes are committed by people known to the victim.

Question 11

How do the media represent offenders and victims?

Answer 11

Crime dramas generally portray offenders as higher status middle-aged offenders. Victims are represented similarly but with a higher proportion of females.

Question 12

How do the media represent the police?

Answer 12

TV crime has a much higher clear up rate compared to official crime statistics. Police are portrayed positively, but in actuality, police brutality and corruption are increasing.

Question 13

What happened to James Bulgar in 1993?

Answer 13

Two 10-year-old boys tortured and murdered a toddler after leading him away from a shopping centre in Merseyside.

Question 14

How did media influence the crime?

Answer 14

One of the defendants might have been influenced after watching the horror film Child’s Play 3

Question 15

Why has fear of crime increased?

Answer 15

More people experience fear than become victims. There is a link between people’s increased fear and the exposure to the news and media. This fear is heightened in viewers of local news, reality TV and tabloid programmes.

Question 16

How do the media reinforce common perceptions of crime?

Answer 16

The media tend to focus more on personal aspects of cases. Going into detail about the victim’s subjective emotional experiences. Ignoring the objective statistical data and most expert observations. Reinforces common perceptions of crime but diminishes the chance to help truly inform public opinion.

Question 17

How do the media represent the causes of crime?

Answer 17

The media represent and portray crime as a result of individuals’ minds. They do not relate this to the actual problems within society like loneliness, lower educational achievement and general everyday issues.

Question 18

How do the media influence policy?

Answer 18

Fearful people opt for more extreme and immediate solutions. This causes policy preference to become corrective rather than preventative.

Question 19

What is criminal justice policy?

Answer 19

The criminal justice policy is the policy that the government form relating to what crime and deviance they are focusing on.

Question 20

What is agenda setting?

Answer 20

Refers to the media’s influence over all the different types of issues that the public think about. They cannot report every single crime that occurs. The public can only form an opinion on the types of crime that the media actually report.

Question 21

How do the media cause crime and deviance?

Answer 21

Imitation, arousal, transmission of knowledge and glamourising

Question 22

What is imitation?

Answer 22

Providing deviant role models resulting in copycat behaviour

Question 23

What is arousal?

Answer 23

Viewing violent imagery gives people the feeling that they can commit crime

Question 24

What is transmission of knowledge?

Answer 24

Allowing individuals to identify how they can pull the crime off

Question 25

What is glamourising?

Answer 25

Showing that crime can look good will make more people inclined to commit it

Question 26

What did Ennals argue?

Answer 26

Argued that young people are vilified by the media and public. The media labels offenders as teenage thieves when there are older offenders involved too.

Question 27

What did Hough and Roberts argue?

Answer 27

Argued that the media report on the most violent and sensational crimes. These are in the minority and are not representative of the types of offence that make up the majority of youth court hearings.

Question 28

Who came up with the labelling theory?

Answer 28

Howard Becker (1963)

Question 29

What is the labelling theory?

Answer 29

If someone is labelled as criminal, they will behave in ways that reflect the label placed upon them. Causes negative consequences as society will become biased against the individual. The individual becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy by taking on the label.

Question 30

What does moral panic mean?

Answer 30

Refers to a widespread irrational fear of something or someone, that people believe is threatening the moral values, structure and security of a community or a whole society.

Question 31

How did Stan Cohen define moral panic?

Answer 31

Defined moral panic as an exaggerated, irrational overreaction by society to a problem

Question 32

When does moral panic occur?

Answer 32

Happens when someone or something is defined as a threat to social norms.

Question 33

How does moral panic work?

Answer 33

The media begin to depict the threat in a stereotypical way. Widespread public concern arises from the heightened media attention. There is a response from authorities. Social change occurs in the form of new laws or policy changes.

Question 34

What did Cohen study?

Answer 34

Studied the fights between two youth subcultures in the 1960s. The media’s involvement with reporting the events helped to demonise the youths and turn them into folk devils. The perceived threat of social norms (the deviant)

Question 35

What is primary and secondary deviance?

Answer 35

Primary deviance is deviant behaviour in its ‘pure’ form whereas secondary deviance is someone’s response to being labelled as deviant.

Question 36

What is a deviancy amplification spiral?

Answer 36

Each group (the deviant and control) feeds of the actions of the other to create a spiral of deviance

Question 37

Why does labelling lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Answer 37

They come to see their deviance as increasingly central to their sense of identity.