Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime

Studies in Newsmaking Criminology

Gregg Barak, Gregg Barak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135886110
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kriminologie

First published in 1995. One of the most pervasive forms of social control in our society is the mass media. The public learns from television, newspapers, magazines, movies, and books what is happening in the world and how to interpret it. The problem, however, is that full or complete interpretations of reality are not presented. In short, reality itself, clear and unadorned, is not to be found in the information provided by the media. Instead, media presentations consist of those various viewpoints that succeed in capturing the minds and imaginations of the masses, or in terms of the 1992 presidential campaign, that successfully put the winning spin on information. Barak and others believe that criminologists should participate in the various media presentations of crime and justice. By bringing their knowledge to bear on media presentations, criminologists can help make some news more representative and less distorted of the social reality of crime.

PART I

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Media, Society, and Criminology

Gregg Barak

Understanding the construction of newsmaking requires an examination of the conscious and unconscious processes involved in the mass dissemination of symbolic consumer goods. Commonly referred to as information or as ideas, these symbolic bites or commodities of news production and the pictures of social reality that they create are inseparable from their cultural history. Media images or characterizations of crime and crime control in the United States are constituted within the core of the social, political, and psychological makeup of American society. Mass news representations in the “information age” have become the most significant communication by which the average person comes to know the world outside his or her immediate experience. As for the cultural visions of crime projected by the mass media, or the selections and presentations by the news media on criminal justice, these representations are viewed as the principal vehicle by which the average person comes to know crime and justice in America.

Crime stories produced by the news media in this country reveal as much about the American experience and U.S. values as they do about crime and the administration of justice. As for the importance of the media’s role in the social construction of crime and criminal justice, Surette (1992: 6) maintains that an improved comprehension of “the underlying dynamics of a society can be gained by examining the points of contact between society’s primary information system—the mass media—and its primary system for legitimizing values and enforcing norms—the criminal justice system.” Moving back and forth between these two systems of social control are morality plays or struggles between bad guys and good guys. While “the tendency to make moral evaluations is of course not limited to thinking about crime,’ it does seem that crime is a “focal point for the human need to hold positive and negative attitudes toward social objects” (Claster, 1992: ix).

Throughout society there are both individuals and groups of people with a wide range of perceptions about crime and justice. These perceptions are influenced by the different ways in which the interplay between criminals, apprehenders, and victims are socially and ethically perceived by ordinary citizens, criminal justice policy makers, those responsible for carrying out legal norms, criminologists, and the press. The mass communication of these perceptions construct a cultural awareness of crime, of victim/offender encounters, and of the administration of justice.

The cultural formation of moral evaluations does not randomly occur. They are not the unadulterated by-products of logic and facts. Moreover, cultural evaluations are not the offspring of some kind of all-powerful elite of the “Left” or “Right.” Nor are the moral or social panics associated with urgent societal problems the exclusive territory of moral or social entrepreneurs. Whether the subject is civil disturbances like the L.A. riots that erupted in response to the Rodney King beating verdict in the spring of 1992, everyday activities like rape and domestic violence that are commonly committed by both strangers and intimates, or homeless victims of the AIDS epidemic who are dying in the streets, what emerges in the construction of social and criminal crises is the tendency for the political parameters of discussion to become rather fixed by a limited public discourse. As Watney (1987) demonstrates in Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media, there is an important need for analysts of media to deconstruct culturally taken-for-granted factuality. In his study, Watney did precisely that by showing how the British government and media based their approach to the AIDS crisis on an agenda of sexual uniformity and conformity, fueled by a not-so-subtle homophobia.

In contrasting nineteenth-century rural America with our emerging twenty-first century urban society, one should appreciate that while the one-dimensional or limited public discourse on “right” and “wrong” remains a constant theme, both its content and form change according to various developments in the political economy, technology, and society at large. As Claster suggests, it was only natural that the cowboy melodrama of the nineteenth-century dime novel was replaced by the twentieth-century fiction and nonfiction of cops-and-robbers. After all, “the urban milieu is more in tune with the experiences and moral expressions of the modern public, among whom struggles between innocent crime victims or ‘untouchable’ lawmen on the one hand and muggers or political terrorists or vice lords on the other are more popular than fights between good cowboys in shining white hats and bad cowboys in greasy black ones” (Claster, 1992: 3). Contemporary cultural fascination or preoccupation with certain kinds of anomalic violent crime, for example, like that involving serial killers, is reflected in the “True Crime” sections of popular bookstores and is not disconnected from the minds and imaginations of news media audiences that are nurtured on a constant diet of an unsafe world where subhuman criminals apparently run rampant. As these types of statistically rare and gruesome crimes are merged in the public (mass) mind with the crimes of fiction, a distorted view of crime (and justice) is perpetuated. At the same time, these mixed perceptions of real and make-believe criminals produced by the mass media not only “provide modern audiences with an outlet for their needs to participate vicariously in the struggle between good and evil forces,” but with “accounts of real struggles between the established moral order and threats to subvert it” that satisfy those same needs (Claster, 1992: 3). Numerous films, docu-dramas, and prime time television shows such as “America’s Most Wanted,” “Top Cops,” “American Detective,” and “Unsolved Mysteries” testify to this mass media construction of law, order, and justice.

As implied so far, the consideration or examination of the interrelationships between media, society, and criminology is essentially a complex and dynamic enterprise. It involves the interaction of journalists, sources, and audiences that coexist within a diverse and eclectic cultural and social system. Serious study also involves attention to the developing political economy and the socio-historical experience of news production that exist within the larger organization of mass media and technological arrangement.

A formulaic expression of media, process, and the perception of crime may be thought of as: PERCEPTION OF CRIME=MEDIA × (CULTURE + POLITICAL ECONOMY) OVER TIME. See figure 1.1 for a conceptual or integrated model of crime news construction. The model suggests that how we define the cultural production of crime as a “social problem” and how we regard victims, offenders, and agents of crime control emerges out of the social interactions between ordinary people, journalists, and sources of information within the structural and political-economic contexts of active processes of news construction and crime management.

Figure 1.1
Media, Process, and the Perception of Crime

More specifically for our purposes, newsmaking criminology—or the study of and interaction with crime and justice news construction—consists of a scrutiny of the dynamism between the production of crime news stories and the wider social order. It further entails an appreciation that crime news, like other news, emerges from struggles that are ultimately resolved, at least momentarily, by the prevailing but not necessarily dominant relations of power. Like news in general, crime news is chiefly a reflection of “the exercise of power over the interpretation of reality” (Gans, 1980: 81). Generally like students of news media, students of newsmaking criminology are concerned with the degree of distortion and bias in the news, or with the distance between the social reality of crime and the newsmaking reality of crime. Like other analysts of the news media, newsmaking criminologists are similarly interested in seeing that the news media “tell it like it is,” and better yet, “like it could be” or “like it should be,” based on an informed scientific view of crime and justice.

Newsmaking criminologists can distinguish themselves from other analysts of the media because they possess a much wider knowledge of the social, political, economic, and cultural complexities of crime and justice. As experts on law and order, newsmaking criminologists are in a better position than other analysts of media to assess the “newsworthiness” of crime news, to deconstruct the selection and presentation of crime news, and to help reconstruct an alternative crime news. These areas of inquiry and activity, taken together, constitute the praxis of what I call “Newsmaking Criminology.”

The studies in this book on news media in general and on newsmaking crime in particular move well beyond those one-dimensional interpretations which maintain either that crime news is a reflection of the interests, preferences, and needs of political, class, and cultural elites, or that crime news is a reflection of the demands, interests, and needs of an homogenized mass audience. Dialectically, our analyses recognize that crime news ultimately reflects the socially constructed perspectives of both the privileged elites and the popular masses. Moreover, our analyses are no less concerned with the policy implications of the construction of crime news than they are with the news media’s representation of criminal behavior per se, especially in terms of how these constructions help to reproduce or reduce crime and violence in the United States. Our focus, then, concerns the various contradictions and tensions involved in the subjective and organizational production of crime news, and in the implicit and explicit crime control policies advocated by the news media.

As part of the larger criminological enterprise, newsmaking criminologists investigate a variety of social relations, including those that encompass the mass media more broadly and those that comprise the news media more narrowly. For a deeper awareness of the social relations of newsmaking criminology, I articulate them below as including three dynamic and interrelated processes of news construction: (1) media reflection, cultural diversity, and crime news; (2) mass media, public order, and symbolic deviance; and (3) social control, news media, and political change. Before turning to this analysis of news media and crime, it makes sense to establish some kind of working definition of “what constitutes news.”

News

Gans (1980: xi), in his classic study of “CBS Evening News,” “NBC Nightly News” Newsweek, and Time, referred to the national news in the U.S. simply as “what this society tells itself about itself.” He argued in much detail that “news is about the economic, political, social, and cultural hierarchies” found within society and, that for the most part, the news “reports on those at or near the top of the hierarchies and on those, particularly at the bottom, who threaten them, to an audience, most of whom are located in the vast middle range between top and bottom” (Gans, 1980: 284). Perhaps more accurately, Gans (1980: 80) defined news as “information which is transmitted from sources to audiences, with journalists—who are both employees of bureaucratic commercial organizations and members of a profession—summarizing, refining, and altering what becomes available to them from sources in order to make the information suitable for their audiences.”

Gans (1980: 52) conceptualized actual news stories by dividing them into two types: “One type is called disorder news, which reports threats to various kinds of order, as well as measures taken to restore order. The second type deals with the routine activities, as well as the periodic selection of new officials, both through election and appointment.” Both types of news stories, despite differences, help to reproduce the dominant social order.

This work is about disorder news of which Gans identified four major categories: natural, technological, social, and moral. Our preoccupation is with news stories that fit the categories of social and moral disorder. The social disorder news stories deal with activities which disturb the public peace. These news stories may include the deterioration of valued institutions such as the nuclear two-parent family. They usually involve violence or the threat of violence against life or physical property. As for the moral disorder news story, it typically reports transgressions of laws and mores which do not necessarily endanger the social order, such as homosexual marriages.

Media Reflection, Cultural Diversity, and Crime News

In Media Performance, McQuail (1992: 162–63) argues that “the degree of correspondence between the diversity of the society and the diversity of media content is the key to assessing … whether or not the media give a biased or a true reflection of society.” It has been shown that despite the expanding media pluralism (many channels) in this and other societies, message pluralism (diversity of content) has not grown accordingly (Gormley, 1980; Gerbner et al, 1982). This is generally the case for media coverage of political, racial, ethnic, class, or sexual diversity. Instead of reflecting the increasingly greater diversity, the media has continued to provide homogenized, mainstream, and uniform versions of reality that tend to avoid fundamental controversy. What accounts for this consistency in the lack of diversity of news media is a reliance on shared journalistic routines, on the same news sources, and on the interaction between fundamental news values and society’s core values. Put another way, since the news media compete for the same audiences and reflect the narrow topical and selection criteria of significance and relevance to the concerns of their audiences and their media organizations alike, it is not surprising that what constitutes “news” does not necessarily conform with reality.

Distortions abound with the portrayals of issues related to race, ethnicity, gender, and class in the news media. Blacks, Hispanics, and other “minorities” such as Asians and Middle-Easterners are generally under-represented in the “good news.” However, when it comes to “bad news,” which is often thought to be more newsworthy than “good news,” blacks and other ethnic minorities are more likely to be identified in negative contexts (e.g., crime), even when they are cast as victims (Hartman and Husband, 1974; van Dijk, 1991). The same kinds of patterns exist with the depictions of women in the news. For example, the economic role of women is usually underestimated. The media typically reports on women of lower status, in subordinate positions to men, or in some statistically uncommon negative role like mistress or prostitute, while other roles, which are no less common in real life, are neglected (Miller, 1975; Blackwood and Smith, 1983). When it comes to class, occupation, and social status, the same kinds of news reporting prevail. Here, “media portrayals accentuate higher skilled, better paid and higher status occupations, both in terms of frequency and often in direction of valuation. Routine or normal working class jobs are rarely seen, except for service roles” (McQuail, 1992:166).

As for portrayals of crime, distortions also exist (Davis, 1952; Fishman, 1978; Graber, 1980; Fedler and Jordan, 1982). The news media consistently underplay petty, nonviolent and whitecollar offenses while they overplay interpersonal, violent, and sexual crimes. Invariably, media portrayals of criminals tend to be one-dimensional reflections of the crimes commonly committed by the poor and the powerless and not those crimes commonly committed by the rich and powerful (Barak, 1988; Munro-Bjorklund, 1991). By contrast, with respect to news media images of the criminal justice system in general and to crime fighters in particular, distortions persist that are contradictory in nature. For example, while the docu-dramas and news tabloid shows repeatedly represent the police as gallant warriors fighting the forces of evil, on the one side, mainstream news constructions, on the other side, often personify the agents of crime control as negatively ineffective and incompetent. Nevertheless, the outcome or “the cumulative effect of these portraits is support for more police, more prisons, and more money for the criminal justice system” (Surette, 1992: 249).

While the reflections of the media on cultural diversity are generally poor, they are not uniformly poor. For example, on some topics such as national politics, sports, big business, and popular entertainment, the media “perform quite well in faithfully reflecting what is going on in the world” (McQuail, 1992: 169). When it comes to “crimes news” in particular, the performance of the news media is generally but not uniformly poor. From the perspective of newsmaking criminology, it is my contention that criminologists should be engaged in research endeavors and news media presentations that will facilitate the mass dissemination of a more accurate picture of crime and social control. In the tradition of the women’s movement’s efforts in the areas of wife battering and sexual assault, newsmaking criminologists also should symbolically “take back the night.” In other words, in response to inaccurate media portrayals of crime and justice, newsmaking criminologists should interject their own characterizations and images of crime and justice for the purpose of redefining these social stories. In doing so, newsmaking criminologists strive to change masscommunicated perceptions of crime and justice. Specifically, newsmaking criminologists work to alter the counterproductive news discourse on deviance, to reconstruct images of crime and justice, and to replace the dominant models of...