Social Sciences
Media and Crime
Media and crime refer to the relationship between mass media and the portrayal, reporting, and representation of criminal activities and justice system processes. This includes the influence of media on public perceptions of crime, the criminal justice system, and the impact of media coverage on crime rates and public policy. The media's role in shaping public attitudes and responses to crime is a key focus of study in this area.
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11 Key excerpts on "Media and Crime"
eBook - PDF- Anne Wade(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Society Publishing(Publisher)
Media and Its Representation on Cultural Crimes 5 CONTENTS 5.1. Introduction .................................................................................... 100 5.2. Criminology And The Media–Society Nexus In The Modern Age ..... 102 5.3. News Values And Newsworthiness .................................................. 104 5.4. Moral Panics And Multi-Mediated Societies .................................... 105 5.5. Cultural Criminology ...................................................................... 106 5.6. Mass Media and Crime ................................................................... 109 5.7. Culture And The Perception Of Crime Across Cultures .................... 111 5.8. Left Idealism ................................................................................... 113 References ............................................................................................. 116 Cultural Criminology 100 There are different definitions of culture and that is basically important to the work of the criminal justice system in every society. There are many conventional theories of crime that have generally unnoticed the impacts of cultural as well as environmental issues and their influence on human behavior. There is a regular struggle over the media representation of cultural crimes that have no boundaries spanning across the world. For example, there is victimization problem of blacks and Latinos community. There is no society that can withstand its presence without some common understanding of social norms and practices, and the people can have variation in their capabilities and thoughts, that have some less social and cultural prospects builds an intellect of discontent, violence, and hindrance in them, that converts into enactment of crime and different behavior. 5.1. INTRODUCTION The human’s viewpoint about others is shaped by media, entertainment, and other forms of popular culture that play a very important role in it.
eBook - ePub- Moira Peelo, Keith Soothill(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Willan(Publisher)
Chapter 2Crime and the media: public narratives and private consumption
Moira PeeloIntroduction
Crime is one of the most popular consumer products of our times. Packaged for newspapers, TV and film drama, crime is everywhere both as news items and as entertainment; and news, in spite of its often solemn wrapping, provides entertainment too. We know about crime and hear about crime everyday through the all-pervasive presence of media in our lives. This ever-present public knowledge produces important challenges to criminologists: to analyse carefully how we know about crime, and to evaluate exactly what it is that we know.The importance of media representations of crime has long been recognised: Reiner (2002) has outlined the large volume of criminological writing on the subject. Reiner usefully separates his overview into the content, consequences and causes of media representations of crime, as a way of guiding the reader through the maze, because each ‘has been the basis for a voluminous literature attempting to analyse the content, effects, and sources of media crime' (p. 377). But rather than acknowledge the embedded nature of media within society, criminologists traditionally attempt to separate out individual media and their specific impacts. So, for example, Reiner outlines the numerous studies trying to establish the impact of media specifically on crime behaviour (as a cause of offending) and on fear of crime (often viewed as part of alarmist political strategies).Perhaps, however, it is sociologists who show us the way forward in framing this discussion; for example, Abercrombie et al. (2000) argue that media are so embedded in ordinary life that we hardly notice the extent of what has been both a technological and an information revolution (pp. 367–8). This embeddedness of media makes the study of individual media and their direct impact on behaviour and feelings about crime too limited for real meaning in criminology. So how can criminologists usefully enter this massively changing media world and what analysis provides the most appropriate approach? In this chapter I will argue that it is public narratives that criminologists must explore to gain understanding of how societies discuss and make sense of crime issues and images, and by which to recognise the socially constructed nature of our understanding of crime.
eBook - ePub- Robert Reiner(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
6 Media, Crime and the Politics of Law and OrderThe last chapter demonstrated how the criminal justice process, and the official statistics it generates, construct an image of crime and criminals that is dominated by the predatory street crimes of the poor and powerless. The suffering inflicted by such crimes, on victims, perpetrators and society at large, cannot be denied. Nonetheless the criminal justice system's conception of crime as emanating from society's lower depths diverts fear and anger away from the even greater wrongdoing and harms of the powerful. The mass-media representation of crime and criminal justice, and the public discourse and politics of law and order that are (mis)informed by it, twist these distortions and projections even further.Concerns about popular culture representations of crime and criminal justice have very long histories, dating back to the eighteenth-century emergence of newspapers (Rowbotham, Stevenson and Pegg 2013). Do the media undermine authority and order, a perennial conservative lament? Or do they exaggerate the risks of crime, fanning fear and encouraging authoritarian solutions, as many liberals and radicals have complained? Such competing anxieties have stimulated not only endless argument but also substantial social science research industries.This chapter shows that there have been fundamental transformations in media discourse about crime over the last half-century, corresponding to wider changes in political economy, social structure and culture. These developments have reinforced the distortions of earlier mass media, and fanned the flames of public fear about crime, bolstering the rise of the politics of law and order.The media crime debate
There is a long history of anxiety about criminogenic consequences of the mass media. It is pivotal to the ubiquitous ‘respectable fears’ about supposedly declining moral standards that Geoffrey Pearson has traced back over the last few centuries (Pearson 1983). We can dub this the ‘desubordination’ thesis: the claim that the media represent crime in ways that undermine authority and encourage deviance. There is also an opposing liberal/radical concern that the media distort the threat of crime, fomenting fear and stimulating public support for authoritarianism. This can be called the ‘discipline’ thesis.
- Chris Crowther-Dowey(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Red Globe Press(Publisher)
The media also focus most on crimes that have been solved (generally again, those of a more serious nature). This reflects ‘organi-sational pressures’ (Reiner, 2000: 142). Many crime stories are obtained from coverage of court cases: this is convenient and effective for journalists, and provides an ‘event-led’ structure and often good headlines. Other coverage is derived from contact with the police, who control information about crimes under investigation, and often form a ‘symbiotic relationship’ with the media. It should be noted, however, that many crimes do not come to the attention of the police, and even when they do, a successful conviction is not always the outcome. An effect of this distortion is that unusual and somewhat atypical offences actually 26 Definitions and Conceptions of Crime become stereotypical images of crime, criminals and the workings of the criminal justice system. This in itself is not necessarily a problem, but research shows that the reaction and response of the popular press to crime may lead to an escalation of anxiety and fear (Jewkes, 2004). Factual media representations of crime have a number of other effects. In particular they help to define and maintain moral boundaries: to identify behaviours that are normal and consistent with the prevailing status quo. Media agents and organizations also play a part in shaping what is thought and said about crime control policy, and in some instance their actions result in ‘moral panics’ (Cohen, 1973). Moral panics The notion of ‘moral panic’ has been influential in criminology, especially in associa-tion with the idea of ‘deviancy amplification’. Croall (1998: 63) characterizes the process as a spiral. If intolerance is shown to deviant behaviour in the first instance, any recur-rence of the deviance is likely to attract a stepped-up response. In other words, the response is amplified. To give a concrete example, young people have been involved in anti-social behav-iour for decades.
eBook - PDF- Ray Surette(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
THE MEDIA AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE POLICY 221 Copyright 2015 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. projected. This is true for the entertainment, news, and infotainment elements of the media, as similar crimes and criminals appear in each. The repeated message in the media is that crime is largely perpetrated by predatory individuals who are basically different from the rest of us; that criminality is predominantly the result of individual problems; and that crimes are acts freely committed by individuals who have a wide range of alternate choices. 50 This image locates the causes of crime solely in the individual criminal and supports existing social arrangements and approaches to crime control. The media-constructed reality of crime also allows crime to be more easily divorced from other social problems and highlighted as society’s greatest threat. In the end, crime-and-justice media advances system-enhancing crime control policies to address individual level defi-ciencies. The media do not provide the public with enough knowledge to directly evaluate the criminal justice system’s performance, but media content steers people toward particular policies and assessments. Crime control does con-sistently better in the media than due process. Not surprisingly, the overriding concern involves the image of the criminal justice system that the media constructs and the public receives. Learning about the criminal justice system from the media is analogous to learning geology from volcanic eruptions.
eBook - PDF- Vincent F Sacco(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
As cultural critic Neal Gabler (1998) forcefully argues, entertainment has become the central paradigm of contemporary media. Indeed, he suggests, entertainment has conquered reality. More useful for our purposes than the distinction between “news” and “entertainment” is a distinction between media forms that purport to describe aspects of the real world and those that do not. In other words, we are most interested in how journalists, interviewers, talk-show hosts, and the makers of “fact-based” dramas “cover” the crime story. It is through this type of content that crime waves are constructed. The newscast, the episodic drama “ripped from today’s headlines,” and the made-for-television movie (which, it is claimed, is “based on an actual incident”) are our central concerns. Importance of Crime to Mass Media That crime and policing are key themes in all forms of media—news and entertainment—seems beyond dispute (Stark, 1987). Irrespective of the his-torical period or the type of medium, crime and crime control provide central forms of narrative. Even a casual observer of contemporary media must be struck by the near cultural obsession with crime. The commercial television schedule, in any given season, includes numerous dramatic programs that focus on the cop and the criminal. Law & Order and CSI are recent examples of a genre that has roots in the very earliest days of the medium. Most typically these programs focus on and ask us to identify with agents of crime control rather than offenders. A program like The Sopranos is the exception in this regard. Daytime talk-show hosts (like Maury Povich) sometimes seem to focus in almost single-minded fashion on “out-of-control teens” and on the use of lie detectors to trap them in their falsehoods. What is true of television is true of other media. As of early 2004, the Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com) listed almost 13,000 films as Mass Media and Crime Waves — 81 belonging to the crime genre.
eBook - PDF- Eugene McLaughlin, Tim Newburn, Eugene McLaughlin, Tim Newburn(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
Media audiences, tired of the ‘permanent crisis in criminal justice’, are actively encouraged to participate in the news produc-tion process. The rise of the ‘citizen journalist’, capable not only of emailing, texting or phoning in their views and concerns, but also of providing news organisations with live footage of events as they happen, presents an additional challenge to offi-cial institutional attempts to manage the news process (Gillmor, 2004). Whilst citizens were once content to consume the news, today they are increasingly involved in producing it. The classic modernist frameworks for understanding crime and justice news still have much to offer. But they cannot embrace the complexity of contemporary flows of communication power and associated perceptions of public credibility in the 24-7 global news mediasphere. Though transformations in the crime and justice and media landscapes have been well documented separately, their complex interaction has yet to be adequately explored. As this chapter has illustrated, many if not most of the defining studies on news media, crime and justice have come from outside criminology. The founda-tional Marxist studies from the Centres at Birmingham, Leicester and Glasgow, the interdisciplinary works emerging from the NDC, and the diverse Post-Marxist inter-ventions were mostly situated within sociological media studies and cultural studies. Likewise many of the most significant developments or critical commentaries on core theoretical concepts – newsworthiness, fear of crime, moral panics. Yet whilst the sociology of media and communications and cultural studies have moved on, news media criminology all too frequently remains locked-in to a now outdated framework of understanting. The interdisciplinary, engaged and sustained news media research that defined the Marxist and early Post-Marxist periods, has been replaced with a growing reliance on superficial content analysis.
eBook - PDFCriminology
A Reader
- Yvonne Jewkes, Gayle Letherby, Yvonne Jewkes, Gayle Letherby(Authors)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
10 Crime and the media: a criminological perspective David Kidd-Hewitt Having considered the extent to which crime statistics can be said to be socially constructed in the previous three readings, we now continue to explore Gary Slapper and Steve Tombs’s suggestion that the mass media also represent crime as socially constructed. In this extract, David Kidd-Hewitt examines the proposition that the media present crime stories (both factual and fictional) in ways that selectively distort and manipulate public perceptions, creating a false picture of crime which promotes stereotyping, bias, prejudice and gross oversimplification of the facts. His argument is that it is not just official statistics that misrepresent the picture of crime, but that the media are also guilty of manipulation and fuelling public fears. One of the television programmes that he singles out as being a significant contributor to false ideas about crime is Crimewatch UK (also mentioned by Slapper and Tombs in Reading 9) which, he argues, is guilty of locking its viewers into a terrorizing world of fear reinforcement. Kidd-Hewitt’s analysis of the relationship between Media and Crime centres on a discus-sion of five key texts which, he argues, were watersheds in the development of sociological understandings of the relationship between crime and the media throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and which remain influential today. An extract from one of these pivotal studies – Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics – is reproduced as Reading 11. CRIMINAL CAREERS AND THE DRAMATISATION OF EVIL: THE SOCIOLOGICAL TRADITION The sociological tradition has concentrated primarily on the ways in which the media provide us with perceptions and social constructions about the world we SOURCE: From Crime and the Media: The Post-Modern Spectacle , ed. David Kidd-Hewitt and Richard Osborne (London: Pluto Press, 1995), 9–24.
eBook - PDFCrime Statistics in the News
Journalism, Numbers and Social Deviation
- Jairo Lugo-Ocando(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Because of this, as we will see in the next chapter, the understanding of crime by the Media Portrayal 76 general public is complicated and the ability of many people to partici- pate in and engage with serious debates around law and order have become, over the years, seriously compromised. References Allan, S. (2004). News culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barlow, M., Barlow, D., & Chiricos, T. (1995). Economic conditions and ide- ologies of crime in the media: A content analysis of crime news. Crime & Delinquency, 41(1), 3–19. Battersby, M. (2010). Is that a Fact? Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press. BBC. (2017). Homicide and knife crime rates ‘up in England and Wales’. Retrieved March 28, 2017, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39729601 Bennett, J. (2006). Modernity and its critics. In J. S. Dryzek, B. Honig, & A. Phillips (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of political theory (pp. 211–224). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berkowitz, D., & TerKeurst, J. V. (1999). Community as interpretive commu- nity: Rethinking the journalist-source relationship. Journal of Communication, 49(3), 125–136. Best, J. (2012). Damned lies and statistics: Untangling numbers from the media, politicians, and activists. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bourdieu, P. (2000). For a scholarship with commitment. Profession, 40–45. Conrad, P. (1999). Uses of expertise: Sources, quotes, and voice in the reporting of genetics in the news. Public Understanding of Science, 8(4), 285–302. Couldry, N., Hepp, A., & Krotz, F. (2009). Media events in a global age. London: Routledge. Davies, N. (2008). Flat earth news: An award-winning reporter exposes falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media. London: Random House. Deuze, M. (2002). National news cultures: A comparison of Dutch, German, British, Australian, and US journalists. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 79(1), 134–149. Ditton, J., & Duffy, J. (1983). Bias in the newspaper reporting of crime news.
- John Muncie, David Wilson(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge-Cavendish(Publisher)
We should be wary of making sweeping claims about media ‘effects’ or about the media being responsible for ‘causing’ crime or fears about crime (Jewkes, 2004). Yet we can certainly look at the ways in which the media is integral to the processes of meaning-making by which we make sense of our everyday lives (Jewkes, 2002). Misrepresentations concerning the extent of certain types of crime and the effectiveness of the criminal justice system are bound to create a skewed picture of the ‘problem’ of crime and its solutions. This chapter has demonstrated that there are significant differences and divergences in the representations of crime and justice in factual and fictional media. Yet the media industries as a whole are complicit in failing to cover systemically all forms and expressions of crime, victimisation, sentencing and punishment, and are collectively guilty of pandering to the most voyeuristic and punitive emotions of the audience. Meanwhile, they promote little discussion of the many injustices perpetrated by the criminal justice system, not least the fact that those groups who are most vulnerable in our society — children, women, people from ethnic minority backgrounds, those with personality disorders and mental illnesses, and people whose lives have been blighted by sexual abuse, childhood neglect, alcohol and drug dependence — are the very individuals who are grossly over-represented in the police cells, courts and prisons of Britain. Seminar Discussion Topics This chapter has suggested that media and political institutions are so intertwined that penal policy is increasingly degenerating into a form of crude penal populism
eBook - ePubThe Role of the Media in Criminal Justice Policy
Prisons, Populism and the Press
- Natalia Antolak-Saper(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Taylor & Francis(Publisher)
1613 Chris Greer, Crime and Media: A Reader (Routledge Student Readers, 2010) 201.14 Robert Reiner, ‘Media Made Criminality: The Representation of Crime in the Mass Media’ in Robert Reiner, Mike Maguire and Rod Morgan (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford University Press, 2002) 302, 376.15 Chris Greer, Crime and Media: A Reader (Routledge Student Readers, 2010) 201.16 Ibid.There may of course be overlap between these philosophical approaches, and significant variation within them when analysing the value of crime reporting. The focus of this book is not so much on these different approaches but rather on the fact that reporting of crime tends to be highly selective and understood through a particular prism. It is coloured by the values of the reporter, the editor and the organisation itself; ‘news media representations of crime and criminal justice are a crucial, yet highly selective and unrepresentative, source of information about crime, control, and social order’.1717 Ibid.Further, it is widely recognised that representation of the nature of crime – in terms of frequency, severity and cause – is often disconnected from official crime statistics or criminological literature. Surette labels this as the ‘law of opposites’ as ‘the nature of crime, criminals, and victims portrayed in the media is generally the complete opposite of the pattern shown through official crime statistics or victim surveys’.18For example, crime reporting predominantly emphasises interpersonal violence between strangers, while in comparison only limited attention is accorded to property offences, the most common form of offending in, for example, Victoria.19
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