Topic 7: Crime and the media Flashcards
Williams and Dickson
British newspapers devote up to 30% of their news space to crime
Ditton and Duffy
46% of media reports were about violent or sexual crimes, yet these made up only 3% of all crime recorded by the police.
Felson
Calls the over-representation of older, middle-class criminals/victims in the media ‘age fallacy’.
Calls the overplaying of extraordinary crimes dramatic fallacy.
Media images lead us to believe you need to be daring and clever to commit/solve crime- the ingenuity fallacy
Differences between picture of crime in official statics and the media:
The media over-represent violent and sexual crime
The media portray criminals/victims as older and more middle-class
Media coverage exaggerates police success
The media exaggerate the risk of victimisation- especially to women, white people and higher status individuals
Crime is reported as a series of separate events- without structure/investigation of underlying causes.
The media overplay extraordinary crimes
Schlesinger and Tumber
In the 1960s the focus had been on minders/petty crime- by the 1990s they were of less interest because of the abolition of the death penalty and the fact that rising come rates meant a crime had to be special to attract coverage. Reporting widened to include drugs, child abuse, terrorism, football hooliganism and mugging.
Found a correlation between media consumption and fear of crime, with tabloid readers and heavy users of TV expressing greater fear of becoming a victim, eps illy of physical attack and mugging
Soothill and Walby
Newspaper reporting of rape cases increased from under a quarter of all cases in 1951 to over a third in 1985. Coverage consistently focuses on identifying a ‘sex fiend’ often by the use of labels like the balaclava rapist. This gives a distorted picture of rape as one of serial attacks carried out by psychopathic strangers- when in most cases the perpetrator is known to the victim.
Cohen and Young
News is a social construction- it is not discovered but manufactured based on news values. These include:
Immediacy
Dramatisation
Personalisation- about individuals- human interest stories
Higher status persons
Simplification- eliminating shades of grey
Novelty or unexpectedness
Risk- victim-centred- about vulnerability/fear
Violence
News focuses on the unusual/extraordinary and so gives more coverage to deviance which is abnormal behaviour by definition.
Mandel
From 1945 to 1984 over 10 billion crime thrillers are sold worldwide, while about 25% of prime time TV and 20% of films are crime shows/movies
Surette
‘law of opposites’- fictional coverage of crime are the opposite of official statistics and strikingly similar to news coverage:
Property crime is under-represented while violence, drugs and sex crimes are over-represented
While real life homicides result from brawls and domestic disputes- fictional ones are often the product of greed/calculation
Fictional sex crimes are committed by psychopathic strangers, not acquaintances.
Fictional villains tend to be higher status, middle aged white males.
Fictional cops normally get their man
However, three recent trends are worth noting- new genre of reality infotainment shows tend to future young, non-white underclass offenders. There is an increasing tendency to show police as corrupt, brutal and less successful. Victims have become central, with law enforced portrayed as their avengers and audiences invited to identify with their suffering.
Ways in which the media may cause crime and deviance:
Imitation Arousal Desensitisation- repeated viewing of violence Transmitting knowledge A target for crime eg TV theft Stimulating desires for unaffordable goods eg advertising By portraying the police as incompetent By glamourising offending
Schramm et al
For most children under most conditions television is probably neither particularly harmful or particularly beneficial.
Livingstone
Despite conclusions that media violence has a limited effect on audiences, people continue to be preoccupied with the effect of media in children because of ours desire to regard childhood as a time of uncontaminated innocence in the private sphere.
Left Realists
The mass media increase the sense of relative dep by their portrayal of ‘normal’ lives. This increases crime.
Cohen
Moral panics- the Media identify a group as a folk devil, present them in a negative way and exaggerate the scale of the problem, moral entrepreneurs condemn the group and its behaviour and this leads to calls for a crackdown which causes a self-fulfilling prophecy or deviance amplification spiral.
Gives example of mods and rockers from 1964 to 66- media used exaggeration and distortion, prediction and symbolisation to produce a deviance amplification spiral.
Moral panics occur at times of social change- when accepted values are undermined resulting in boundary crisis
McRobbie and Thorton
Moral panics are now routine and have less impact- in late modern society there is little consensus about what is deviant so it is harder for the media to create panics about them.
