the media and crime Flashcards
postman
crime has become infotainment, a mixture of fact and reality/ real crime inspiring fictional media
Kidd Hewitt and Osbourne (1995)
they recognise crime as a spectacle, we can’t get enough of criminal masterminds, thrillers and murder mystery
Surette (2010)
backwards law/ law of opposites: when media construct a picture which is an opposite version of reality they overreport crime which are rare
Reiner- fictional crime distorts our view
crime excites the imagination, media seeks out newsworthy crime stories which will excite and captivate us, they use news values to attract audiences
Greer and Reiner (2012)
- new media is criminogenic because: opportunity, absence of controls, means, motive (social learning)
- copycat crimes, knowledge, imitation, arousal, desensitisation, criminogenic society (unattainable ideals), poor capable guardians (police seen as incompetent), glamourising offenders.
Hyperreality of crime
- crime is socially constructed in the media- they set the agenda of what is important and use news values to select what we see along with distorting the picture of what’s actually happening
- this distorts our fear of becoming a victim, altering our understanding of what patterns of crime exist, increasing our concern over crime in society
- Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality-> media doesn’t reflect reality, it creates a new one
McRobbie and Thornton -> moral panics are outdated
- frequency: there are too many that they’re no longer relevant
- context: many values and views in society so not easy to scapegoat/create moral panics
- reflexivity: concept of it is so well known so some groups try to create one for their gain
- difficulty: less certainty about what’s unambiguously ‘bad’ today so they’re hard to start
- rebound: people are wary about them because it might backfire
What are the factors for the media being a cause of crime?
- the nature of capitalism creates a cycle of poverty via the false needs promoted by advertising, leading the poorest to committ crime to fulfill these
- relative deprivation results in the strain to anomie because people always feel like they can’t afford something that someone else has
- feminist approaches point to women’s representation and sexualisation in the media being a key reason for violence against women in society because it means they are seen as weak and subordinate, howver, the media can also challenge these representations, encouraging women to be seen as strong and dominant
- promoting moral panics: moral entrepeneurs direct people’s attention towards certain moral panics which might make people want to partake in the crime shown
- imitation and desensitisation: media transmit methods of crime which desensitises peole to violence, even making them think it’s cool or they can get away with it, however, this is based on small studies with inconclusive findings
- cyber crime: depersonalisation of the internet allows identity frauud, trolling and cyber harassment, and cyber dependent crime as well as creating new ones. the dark web can also be seen as enabling crime
media reporting of crime
- misrepresentation: Cumberbatch et al found that 38-53% of news is crime which doesn’t reflect society. Williams and Dickinson suggest that crime coverage is higher in tabloids than broadsheets. Sexual crimes with women as the victim are overrepresented while more common crimes are seen as less important.
- news values: Galtung and Ruge suggest that this helps with agenda setting. news is selected to obtain viewers not inform them, only relevant things are shown. dramatisation, immediacy, simplification and status socially construct the news
- moral panics: news is manufactured and disproportionate, stigmatises minorities, skews perception of perpetrators and reinforces narratives such as the ‘benefit scroungers’.
Dramatic fallacy
media ‘falsifies’ the picture of crime by overdramaticising it (eg Postman- infotainment)
Social learning theory
bandura, media teaches us
Hypodermic syringe model
media ‘injects’ content directly onto us, it’s powerful, immediate and addictive
